Lisa's nose

I read somewhere that the number of taste buds on a persons tongue can range from below 2,000 to more than 10,000. The article also mentioned that people with a low number of taste buds can eat just about anything and enjoy it. In other words, they are not picky eaters. I probably don't have too many taste buds on my tongue. the super tasters who have lots of taste buds however are the gourmet eaters. They love to savor their food and they are very picky. They find some foods very disgusting and others superb.

As most of us know, the sense of smell is closely related to the sense of taste so if this same example also holds true for smells then Lisa has an outstanding number of olfactory sensors in her nose. There are some smells that she just loves. Oddly enough, some of her favorite odors are solvents. She loves the smell of an automotive repair shop (as do I by the way) but she also loves the smell of the exhaust of diesel power engines. If we get behind a city bus she's in seventh heaven (where is seventh heaven anyway).

She also loves to smell the newspaper and every little booklet that comes in the mail. I know this makes it sound like my wife is a druggy (to be honest the thought has crossed my mind) so I would like to point out that she also loves to smell the flowers and she will tell you every flower by name just by it's smell.

As you might expect, with such a strong opinion on what smells she loves, she is also absolutely repulsed by other smells. She will instantly grab her shirt and shove it in her face when she smells some foods. I remember when we were still newly weds I cooked myself some brussel sprouts and she about gagged. Needless to say, I've never cooked them since but I will order them once in a while in a restaurant. The same goes for liver. Of course the ultimate repulsive "Lisa" odor is the cats litter box. We have the litter box upstairs in the far corner of the house and if Sheba uses her box Lisa will start gagging even though she might be downstairs in the farthest corner away from the litter box. This is true even if we've just cleaned the box and it's the first time the cat has used it. I guess the good thing is that I'm sure we clean that box long before any guests coming to the house could smell it.

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During the 18th and 19 centuries, it was commonly believed that many diseases were caused by smells. Odors from corpses, feces, urine, swamps, and Earth fissures, were called "miasmas" and were thought to have the power to kill you. To ward off these smells, people carried and inhaled "antimephitics," such as garlic, amber, sulfur and incense. When exposed to miasmic odors, people did not swallow their saliva, but spit it out. The Viennese physician Semmelweis was ostracized by colleagues when he declared that washing one's hands, not breathing antimephitics, would stop most disease from spreading.

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