Weird dreams and overwhelming smells

I’ve been having a lot of strange dreams since we moved into the apartment.  Don’t worry – I’m not going to subject you to ANY details.  Nobody cares about anyone else’s dreams.  I barely care about my own.  Just…they’ve been weird.  I don’t think it’s the apartment’s fault.  I suppose it could be, in a blameless kind of way.  Lots of things are different.

  1. John and I switched sides of the bed.  Not for any particular reason.  I mean, we had a reason.  When we moved in, we put my dresser on one side of the bed and his on the other.  His is much taller, and I like to be able to reach the top of mine, so we switched so I could be next to my dresser.  Also, I’m on the side next to the bathroom (important).
  2. Our bedroom window faces southwest instead of north, so the light is different, even with the blinds closed.
  3. Our window faces out onto a parking lot (fancy!) instead of a street, so it’s lit completely differently (and so the light coming in is different, even with the blinds closed).
  4. We live in an apartment complex, not a neighborhood with houses, so the nighttime noises are different.  Nothing is particularly loud.  In fact, it might even be quieter since we don’t have teenagers across the street anymore.

On top of the weird dreams (and possibly not unrelated, now that I think about it), our apartment seems to hold on to kitchen smells for a very long time.  We’ve been cooking a lot lately (yay for being grown-ups!), but not everything stinks up the apartment.  We noticed it with roast beef a couple of weeks ago (and with something else I can’t remember).  The whole place smelled like roast beef (STRONGLY of roast beef) for at least two days.  I’m afraid yesterday’s brisket is going to linger the same way.  It’s been warm enough to leave windows open, so I hope that’ll help.  We left the windows open all day yesterday while it was cooking, and we opened them again when we left for work, but we were practically assaulted by it when we came back in from boxing this morning.  John’s towel smells like brisket.  I did laundry yesterday – do the clean clothes smell like brisket?  I’ve been in the apartment for most of the last 24 hours – do I smell like brisket?  Oh, god.  (My officemate says I don’t smell like brisket.  At least, not from a normal distance away.  I didn’t make her get up close and smell me.)

At least we’re not being subjected to BAD smells, no trash or raw fish or anything like that.  But why can’t the apartment hold on to lighter, more pleasant smells, like the cookies I made weekend before last?  I like brisket and roast beef (and whatever the third thing was) very much, but once dinner is over, I don’t want to smell them anymore.  I think I’d rather enjoy smelling cookies all the time.  Or toast.  I love the smell of toast.