Tag: bed bugs

opposite frustrations

Posted on by jplatt27

What makes you angry? Who makes you angry?

This is one question I have to answer in preparation for the first module of my life coach training this weekend.  I have to be honest there aren’t a lot of things that come to mind off the top of my head so I’ve had to think about this a little bit.

But when we got from New York on Sunday night Mike reminded me of something that drives. me. crazy.

We walk in the door around 8:45 after picking up Chipotle before getting a cab home from the bus. First thing Mike does when we get home: empty our bags and put everything into trash bags with moth balls (a preventative measure in case we picked up any hitchhikers from the hotel–a little paranoid? probably but I do understand his concern, we don’t want to go through that again).

First thing I do when we get home: drop my bags, turn on the TV, and settle onto the couch with my burrito bowl.

After Mike finishes his burrito, he starts looking around in the kitchen. (I found some random bugs a couple weeks ago in one of our kitchen cabinets.) “I found some more of those bugs.  They were dead, but still.”

More bugs? Ok, they’re dead?  No action necessary, I think.

Next thing I know he’s emptying everything out of the cabinet again and asking that I help him pull the cabinet out from the wall.

Do we have to do this now? I think. We just got home from a super busy weekend and it’s late. Can’t you see I’m busy watching the latest episode of the Kardashians? 

The next morning I’m making my usual chocolate chip pancakes and moving some baking sheets out of the way so I can get a measuring cup.  A second later Mike is standing in the kitchen saying “you’re not putting all of that stuff back already, are you?”

No, I’m not. I’m just moving them out of my way so I can get a measuring cup. (I actually might’ve said this with a little ‘tude.  Ok, I’m sure I did.)

Last night I pick Mike up from the metro, he stopped to get groceries and the bus he was taking broke down on the way home.  I unload the groceries and tell him to relax while I make dinner.  He changes his clothes and next thing I know he’s in the kitchen opening the cabinet again to check for more bugs.

Do we have to do this now? You just got home.  And I’m trying to make dinner.  Why do we need to freak out?

“You know what makes me angry?” I ask Mike. “When you are paranoid about things and start stressing out over something so small like bugs.”

“You know what makes me angry?” Mike says to me. “Your apathy to things like this.”

I just started laughing.

 

Overwhelmed with stuff

Posted on by jplatt27

This is what our apartment looked like when we got home from work on Monday:

No we weren’t robbed. This is how our apartment looked when we prepped for the bed bug treatment. That’s our dining area filled with stuff from our closets, under the bed, other miscellaneous things.

Yep, that’s our bath tub full of trash bags filled with bedding, clothes and shoes. And that’s our bed standing up (there’s nothing else in our bedroom aside from furniture).  And that’s our entry way filled with more trash bags filled with more clothes.

And that’s not even the half of it.  We’re using the vacant studio apartment next door to store most of our clothes.

This process totally sucked before the first treatment when we had to spend an entire day prepping our apartment by cleaning out our entire bedroom and all of our closets and washing pretty much every fabric we own. But then we went to Florida and got a break for the weekend. And it hasn’t been that bad.

But at this point we’re starting to get overwhelmed by the clutter, by the amount of laundry that keeps piling up, at the fact that we can’t find things.  A lot of my pants are snug because they had to go through the dryer and I usually don’t put a lot things in the dryer, and definitely not on high heat (recommended to kill bed bugs). And we’re only halfway through!

A bottle of shampoo spilled in the tub (unbeknownst to us) so when we pulled the bags of bedding out to wash so we could go to bed on Monday night, we ending up getting shampoo on our floor and then we stepped in it and almost slipped. Then when we got back from the laundry room, I got some shampoo on my sock which then got on my leg when I sat cross-legged on the couch.

Packing to go home for Christmas is going to be such a treat. At this point I don’t even remember what clothes I own.  We’ll spend most of the night tonight doing laundry. And at $2 per wash and $2 per dry, this isn’t a cheap process either.  (Though I really can’t complain because our building has been wonderful and is paying 100% of the exterminator’s fees.)

But there is one source of joy in our apartment:

It’s not our best Christmas effort but it’s doing the job. There are four presents under the tree: two for Mike and two for me!  I’m excited to open them at Mike’s parents house on Christmas morning.

We let them bite

Posted on by jplatt27

Other potential titles for this post:

  • Why my husband slept on the couch for a week
  • Operation Bed Bug (for real)

Long post ahead…here goes…

Monday after Thanksgiving we woke up with a bunch of bites.  But we had an exterminator coming on Wednesday so we I didn’t fret too much.

Tuesday night Mike did some investigating, checking our bed with a flashlight.  I’m washing the dishes, talking to my sister on the phone when Mike calls “I think I found the culprit.  And I think we have bed-bugs.” He shows me a spot on the underside of the bed skirt, where there are three little black dots that look just like bed bug tracks. (Remember Operation Bed Bug?  That’s how he knew what to look for.) A lot of pacing, sighing, and maybe a little fighting ensued from there.

Wednesday I worked from home so I could be here when the exterminator was here, shed some light on our bites, and what we thought the cause might be.  I showed the exterminator the spot Mike had shown me the night before and said we thought it might be bed bugs. The property manager saw a tiny tiny clear bug walking on the bed skirt in the spot I showed them.  The exterminator caught the bug to take to the lab because it was too small to identify.  Both the exterminator and the property manager assured me that we didn’t have bed bugs, that we would know if we did.  We’d see them in the corners of the wall and in all the seams of the bed. We’d know what the culprit was when the mystery bug was identified in the lab that afternoon.

I’m a happy camper and call Mike at lunchtime to tell him that it’s not bed-bugs.  That the exterminator had checked our bed when he was out the week before and didn’t find any signs of them.  We are so relieved.

Then at 4:30 there’s a knock at the door.  It’s the property manager.  She says I’m sorry to tell you that the mystery bug was actually a baby bed bug.

Have you seen the Jimmy Kimmel video where the kids fall on the floor and start hysterically crying when their parents tell them they ate all their Halloween candy?  Yeah, that’s pretty much how I felt in this moment.

We were scheduled for our first bed bug treatment on Monday and given a packet of what we needed to do to prep our apartment. Here’s a list: wash and dry all clothes, bedding, and other fabrics in hot water and store in trash bags sealed tight; empty all drawers, bookshelves, closets; vacuum all floors; pull all furniture away from the wall.

We were headed to Florida for the weekend for my sister’s birthday so we both took of on Thursday to deal with all of this. And I’m so glad we did.

It was a crazy 48 hours. After $75 at the dry cleaner, 3-5 hours in the laundry room, a couple of arguments, and another night on the couch, we boarded a plane to Florida happy that our apartment was properly prepped for the treatment.

But it doesn’t end there.  We still have two treatments to go, nothing in our bedroom save some sheets on our bed (which, yes, we are sleeping in finally), and trash bags of clothes everywhere. We’re both paranoid in our own way: Mike asking me to use one of my pillows after his fell on the floor in the middle of the night and me wondering if bugs are jumping off me and onto the person next to me on the bus.

Looking forward to mid-January when this will all be over!