Is it time to start collecting the bedbug adventures together? Maybe it is time. Here are the previous episodes, gathered.
The past few weeks have taught me that bedbugs have two evil superpowers:
- One, although it's easy to heat a particular bedbug to death, they are famously persistent and hard to kill as an entire population, so that a battle of attrition won't work against them. It's all-or-nothing, baby.
- Two, if they bug you (so to speak), they're most likely to do it at night, so that even on the nights they're not (so to speak) bugging you, it's still creepy and hard to sleep.
The past few weeks have also taught me that bedbug infestations make excellent topics of conversation. Everyone has an opinion, or curiosity, and my friends (when I do get to see them, or when we chat via email) ask about them all the time. It's not that I'd recommend that lonely people go out and find some bedbugs, but I will say there are weird up-sides to our past experience.
At any rate, we've been battling bedbugs. When I last updated this blog, we'd used The Incinerator to heat up---in a very intense and very long weekend---each of our upstairs rooms in turn. When The Incinerator was finally finished, I used Dracaris-the-Heat-Gun to carefully toast anything I could think of toasting on the first floor. And then, at 4:23 p.m. on Monday the 24th (approximately), I saw a live bedbug on my bedroom ceiling, freaked and gave up, and called for an exterminator appointment on the first possible date. And that's where I left off last time.
On the one hand, the Incinerator (aka, "The Cube") was a fairly pricey option compared to other alternatives, costing about $1300, not to mention the cost of the electricity for running it. (Want your very own? We got this one.) On the other hand, once we were done incinerating the upstairs rooms, we posted it on Craigslist for $1000. in a way, we're thinking of this more like renting it for $300+electricity for the weekend, and that is way more cost-effective than any professional service out there . . . so, something to keep in mind for the future.
As an aside, and we got an offer within the day. If that offer had been legitimate, that would have been great, but instead it was a guy who sent us a cashier's check, for twice what we asked. Apparently, sending worthless cashier's checks is a standard Craigslist scam, so we reported the dude and will start over.
Back to the main story: The bedbug that I saw on Monday at 4:23 didn't have a name tag, but if it had, the name might very well have been "Ozymandius". Why that name? Because that bedbug was the last bug I've seen since. (Not the last bedbug I thought I saw; in the middle of the night, several times, I woke up thinking they were with me, as per the psychological warfare noted above, but my trusty flashlight revealed nothing except maybe a hair or a bead of sweat.)
I've seen no bedbugs, and believe me, I've searched. I haven't even seen carcasses. There have been no bedbugs in my bed, nor in my husband's, nor in the dog's. There are no carcasses in the carpet, in the bathroom, or in the couch. Every night I scout around nooks and crannies of the house with my flashlight; every morning I investigate in all our sleeping spaces; I'm coming up empty, here, people.
Nonetheless, we emptied our closets, heating all clothes in the dryer, giving all shoes the Dracaris treatment, and then depositing everything into well-labeled [shudder] plastic bags. Likewise for everything in our drawers. The contents of my filing cabinets, we cooked in the oven at 170 degrees. (I'm cookin' the financial books, folks: I admit it!)
Monday morning, I woke at 5:30, threw my bedsheets and the dog bed downstairs for the washing machine to deal with. I took Prewash to my office, where at 6:30, we taught my faraway students the joys of Riemann sums and sigma notation. And at 7:02, the exterminators showed up at my home, to be greeted by my husband. They made their first rounds -- they'll be back in three weeks, and then again three weeks after that.
And . . . that's all I got for ya. I don't want to say "we did it!", because I've heard too many stories about the difficulty of eradication. But I can say it kind of feels like that at this point.
I'm not sure what I'll have to talk about with people, now. Ah, well.
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