Scents

When I was in Cairo I bought some soap at a nice store that sells a bunch of natural products. The soap is basil scented. It smelled nice, and the soap looked to be high quality. They had many other scents, but basil seemed new and interesting, so I got a little bundle of four bars of basil soap.

The soap is nice, but the basil scent is a little odd. It's very pleasant, but when I shower I sort of feel like I'm showering with pesto or something. It's not a bad smell at all; it's just unusual for soap.

In other olfactory news, the entire KIST lawn on this side of campus has been cut by one guy with a weed whacker over the course of Friday and Monday. I don't know why. Usually it is done by hand by a team of workers with scythes. The total area is perhaps an acre. Maybe two. The weed whacker guy was working around the guesthouse this morning, which was somewhat annoying. But he finished, and now there is a nice summery cut-grass smell. I like it.

Finally, this weekend the guesthouse lost power for around 36 hours. This isn't typical. Usually power outages are 10-15 minutes. It wasn't that inconvenient, since I was working in my office, which had power and internet. And I have a headlamp and candles and a little rechargeable LED desklamp. So light was no problem.

The problem was the refrigerator. Suffice it to say that the fridge doesn't smell very good right now. I threw out my things that had spoiled, but there is some food that I don't think belongs to anyone, so nobody has thrown it out. Tomorrow I may lose patience and just purge anything that looks suspect.