After Saturday’s good results, we brought the bedroom things in Monday night. We let the bed warm up a couple days and Wednesday night, I slept in it. No bites in the morning, but my brain likes to play tricks on me. Last night, I slept in the bed again, but this time, Lisa joined me. This was a big test and, while I have been kind of used to sleeping in our bedroom since it got infested and used to being a “test meat,” she’s not used to it. It was a very tough night for her. I kept telling her that, if she wanted to, she could go back into the guest bedroom for me to test a bit more, but she chose not to. This was probably the right thing to do for the long run, but it’s gonna make for a few miserable days until she comfortable with the idea that she’s not going to be snacked upon during the night.

One thing the exterminators told us after the first fumigation was that we might get “hysterical bites”. Maybe the adjective is correct, but the word carries too many negative, insulting connotations. The day after we slept in our bed after the initial fumigation, we were bitten numerous times. The exterminators were initially telling us they were hysterical bites. It wasn’t until I had captured numerous bugs for them to see that these were not “hysterical,” they were just “ineffectual.”

It’s been over these past two nights that I’ve gotten a better understanding of what they mean by hysterical bites. I’ve woken a few times when I could swear I felt a bite. Never mind that I’ve never actually felt any of the real bites — this time, I know there’s a bug there! Quick, flip on the light, examine the bed, examine the area of the “bite” — nothing. The brain’s a funny thing. I think Lis experienced more than a few of these moments last night, suppressing many of them. I really want to help her, but I think I’ve done as much as I can. All I can do now is assure her that I understand how she’s feeling and, really, I don’t mind waking up for these spastic bed checks.

Overall, though, I think it’s looking good for signaling the all clear. We’ve allowed our hopes to get raised and subsequently dashed too many times for us to be truly excited about this, but with every bite-less night we spend there, I think the excitement is growing. Still, I think we’re both looking at each other, silently wondering when the other shoe will drop. When the bug hordes will be unleashed upon us, ambushing us in bed some night, long after we’ve declared victory?

Technorati Tags: bat bugs, bed, bugs, good riddance, infestation, sleep, the end

Finally? Maybe. Most of our bedroom stuff is still outside, but we wanted to test whether the bugs were out or not before bringing the bed back in or buying a new one. No sense in worrying about the bed if that’s not where the bugs are.

So, with that in mind, Lis and I came up with an agreement. She would do her best to make something in the place where our bed used to be that is more comfortable than “floor and a pillow” and I’d sleep in it / sacrifice my body. A few extra comforters, some clean sheets, and a quilt, along with a spare pillow later, she had completed her part of the deal. I know from my previous experience, that when I do the “donate my body to the bugs”-thing, I have a hard time sleeping (for some reason or the other). I also know that I should check for bugs about two hours after I go to bed. This time, I figured I’d go to bed later so that I actually had a chance of falling asleep. No such luck. I got to bed a little after 1am, but could not sleep very well. Around 3am, Lisa came in (today’s her morning to sleep in, so she went out with friends) and we checked for bugs. (A fun couples activity if I ever heard one!)

Now, normally, this is where we find the bugs and I move back to the guest bedroom bed. Nothing. We found no bugs. I went back to (trying to) sleep on the pseudo-bed and Lis went to bed in the guest room. A few times during the night, I was sure I felt them on me, but when I turned on the flashlight and looked around, nothing.

I would seem that the bugs are gone. I feel itchy in a few places, but most of that can be explained by dry skin and the fact that my brain hates me. I don’t want to say for sure that they’re gone — the bites can take some time to appear — but it’s looking good.

The next step will be for us to bring back in the bed, night stands, and lamps and see if the problem comes back. We’ll probably bring them in a bit at a time to eliminate variables. Let’s see if the recent cold-snap has done it’s job and finished them off. I’d be sooo happy if the bug saga is over, especially if we can get out of this without buying more bedroom furniture or paying the exterminators any more.

Technorati Tags: bat bugs, bed, bugs, good riddance, infestation, sleep, stop biting us

TiVo
The Cox guy, Joe, arrived last Wednesday with three cable cards. The first worked right out of the box. The second didn’t and neither did the third. He said that that’s about typical. There are two types of cards they carry: the “old” cards and “2006″ cards. The old card have about a 1 in 3 failure rate, whereas the 2006 cards a 1 in 20. A 5% failure rate is definitely better than a 33% failure rate, but still, 5% is higher than it should be.

With three cards down and one slot still waiting to be filled, Joe did something I really appreciated. I’m not sure it was because of a strong commitment to customer service or he just didn’t want to come by again. He called around to other Cox installers in the area to see if any of them have a spare 2006 cable card. He found one out in Centreville and went out to get it. He returned about 40 minutes later with the card, popped it in, and a couple minutes later, we had a happy second tuner. I’m very happy with him doing this. He did a good bit to pull my opinion of Cox techs out of the sewer.

So now we’ve had TiVo series three loving for the past week. How have we liked it? It’s been pretty nice. Compared to the Cox DVR, it’s a wild frenzy of lovin’. My only complaint about the TiVo right now is that the front display won’t stay at the “bright” or “regular” brightness setting after you set it. It’s normal setting (”dim”?) is too low for us to really see from the couch. After calling TiVo tech support, I found out that it’s a software problem that’ll be fixed in the next software release, which should be “in a few weeks.” Annoying, but if this is the worst thing we have to say about the TiVo, we’re golden.

Bugs
A lot of the bedroom stuff (bed, night stands, lamps, etc.) is still out on the back deck, shrouded in blue tarps. I’d like to give the bedroom a test run before bringing the stuff back in, though. I figure, while uncomfortable, it’ll help reduce some variables. If I get bit more, we’ll know that the problem runs deeper than the stuff on the deck and that buying a new bed will just infest that too. I really hope that it’s an uneventful night (or at least few hours) and that this extended stay in the cold outside will be enough to finally rid us of these damn bugs.

Technorati Tags: bat bugs, bed, bugs, cox, die bugs die, tivo

Operation Deep Freeze or, at least, Slight Chill, has begun. Lis and I took the mattress, box spring, bed frame, night stands, lamps, and other assorted master bedroom stuff out onto our deck for at least 72 hours of 50° or less weather. We got a couple big tarps at Lowes yesterday and used them for completely covering the furniture. Here’s one of the few times in life where I’m hoping for cold, cold weather.

Unfortunately, it looks like it’s going to just be cold enough to meet our requirements over the next three days. I don’t feel very good about it being so close to 50°, so we might just leave the stuff out until the next predicted cold snap: Jan 16th through the 22nd, where it’s supposed to be solidly in the low 40°s and high 30°s.

This is our last best chance to get rid of the bugs. That is, it’s our last chance to get rid of them if they are in our bed. Our big fear is that they weren’t coming from the bed but from somewhere else. We’ll try killing the bugs with cold, bring the bed back in, sleep in it and get bitten more. We’ll go out and get a new bed, only to have the problem continue. If that happens, then we just wasted big bucks getting a new bed and are now in the same place we were in before. Of course, we have no other real option.

They haven’t migrated, which is good. They’re supposed to be able to detect CO from about 100′ away, which should include all of the bedrooms, yet — knock on wood — we haven’t been bitten in the guest room and G hasn’t been bitten in her room (although they’d have a heck of a climb to get up where she is). This kind of leads me to believe that they are in the bed somewhere. For the last couple months, the legs of the master bed have been sitting in plastic dishes that were loaded with bug poison. They don’t jump or fly, so their only egress would be the legs. Over time, the liquid’s dried up, but I bet that there’s enough poison residue to still keep them away (if they can sense it).

Let’s hope that it all ends here or at least on the 22nd, which gives us one week to test things out before Lisa’s surgery.

Technorati Tags: bat bugs, bed, bugs, die bugs die, stop biting us

Sunday night, I decided to sacrifice the body and see if the bugs were still a problem in our master bedroom. Joe, our exterminator who we’ve spent way too much time with, tried a couple new things again, suggested we try a different wrap for the box spring, then wished us luck. On the 11th of last month.

We really want to be back in our bedroom (we’ve been in the guest bedroom since mid-to-late July), but by now, our optimism for hitting upon a solution is so low, we really don’t really even want to bother with trying. Of course, we’ll remain in limbo like this until we check (Schrodinger’s bat bugs?), so check I do.

One helpful hint Joe gave us was to set an alarm for about two hours after you go to sleep. This gives the bugs enough time to smell your CO₂ and head out, yet not enough for them to take too many blood “donations.” The last time we checked, I think I only had one or two bites. This time, I wound up going to sleep a bit after I expected, so I was only in the bed for less than two hours, which I guess is a good thing, since I had four or five bites. I only found one bug (on the headboard), but where there’s one, there are more.

Where to go now? While I was recovering from my all-nighter yesterday, Joe called. He wanted to possibly bring some of their PHDs over to check things out. He suggested either keeping the mattress and box spring outside in sub-30 degree weather for three-plus days, which should kill both the hatched bugs and the eggs. The problem with this is that we haven’t had any constant, really cold weather. I’m not even sure if the coldest we’ve had this autumn has been under 30 degrees.

The other suggestion was to ditch the mattress and box spring. I love the bed in our master bedroom. Well, aside from the bugs. The mattress is just perfect. Not too soft, not too firm.

He didn’t say it, but I’d think that while we were at it, it might be a good idea to replace the bedframe too. He might be thinking that with all the poisons he’s put on it, there could be no living bugs there, but I’m not sure I’d like to risk it because if he’s wrong, we’re back to the same problem. Of course, if he’s wrong about the bugs not being able to come from anywhere but the bedframe, mattress, or box spring, then we’re also back where we started.

Overall, replacing the whole bed will probably cost somewhere north of $1000. We can swing it, but there are many other things we’d rather spend it on.

Pleh.

Technorati Tags: bat bugs, bugs, exterminators, infestation, stop biting us

Not this past Wednesday. Not the Wednesday before that. Go back one more week to the 13th. That’s the day the exterminator last came here. He tried a few new things, including the most powerful poison he’s allowed to try. He said we needed to wait a few days, then we can try sleeping in the room again, but when we do, we should set the alarm for two hours out, then check with a flashlight. Apparently, it takes a couple hours for The Bugs to notice a human presence and come out. If we wait those two hours then check, we won’t get bit up as much and we’ll still get an indication of whether or not they’re still around.

Due to overall lack of sleep (and not wanting to get up two hours into a fairly short night of sleep anyway) and lack of enthusiasm, I didn’t get around to trying again until last night. I hit the (bugless?) sack around midnight and set the alarm for 2am. Two in the morning rolls around and on comes NPR. I don’t know what was on, but my immediate thought was that this sounds like the most interesting program in the world and that I should stay there and carefully consider the arguments. Hmmmmm… or I should check for bugs. I chose the latter. I got up and looked around. Nothing obvious. After a brief bathroom break and a once over of myself in the mirror to see if I could see any bites, it was back to the check for part two. I found nothing… until I looked at the pillow. There that bastard bug was. It was a juvenile, all fattened up with my blood. I quickly scooped him up (the result of Protech initially telling us it was all in our heads the first time we told them their program didn’t work), the looked around for more. At least this time I didn’t find any more. Last time, by the time I had decided to go back to sleep in the guest room, I had found five. This time, I could only find one.

I have no idea what’s up next. I guess we can tear apart the bed frame. It’s the only thing I can think of. Nothing’s hanging on the ground. There are sticky pads around all four legs. I don’t have the bugs on me, otherwise, we’d still be getting bit when sleeping in the guest room. They can’t jump. They can’t fly. It’s got to be the bed frame. Well, it’s got to be the bed frame, unless they’re coming down the ceiling fan and falling onto the bed from there. It sounds far-fetched, but right now, I won’t rule it out.

Technorati Tags: bat bugs, bugs, exterminators, infestation, protech, stop biting us

I got up around 4am to go to the bathroom. Didn’t notice any bug bites, but then, it was 4am. When I got back, I I looked around. Damnit! Right there on the headboard — the place the “exterminator” has been focusing his poisonous vengeance. I looked around some more and found four others; three on the bed and one more on the headboard. *sigh*

These bugs don’t jump or fly, the only crawl. To isolate the source of the problem, we placed the bed away from the wall and made sure there was nothing hanging to the floor for them to crawl up. Finally, we put glue pads around the legs of the bed. If they tried crawling up there, they’d get stuck and we’d see.

The fact that I saw bugs on the bed and nothing in the pads means that they came from the head or footboards. Lis has only mentioned Joe doing the headboard, but I was assuming she meant the whole bed frame. It makes absolutely no sense for him to only do that part of the frame and not the rest. Maybe I had assumed too much, eh? Well, we’ll find out more later today when Lis calls Joe about it.

This reminds me of a book of G’s.

Pleh. Time to get some tree pictures.

Update: Aw, crap. I think I do have a bite on my jaw and a couple on my neck.

Technorati Tags: bat bugs, bugs, exterminators, infestation, protech, stop biting us

Our friendly neighborhood exterminator came by yesterday. He put more nasty stuff on our headboard (where he currently thinks the badbugs where hiding). He said that he thinks the bed would be ready for use tonight. The last time we tried the bed, Lis went to bed hours before I did and discovered the bugs before I got to bed. Because of this, she nominated me to be the sacrificial human tonight. She’ll sleep in the guest room and inspect me in the morning. If I pass inspection tomorrow (and maybe again Sunday morning), she’ll try it again.

I’m conflicted about these guys. On one hand, they’re exterminators, yet, up to this point at least, they can’t seem to actually exterminate our bugs. As far as I know, they’re not some mutant strain of super bug, just normal bat bugs. On the other hand, they really do seem to be going out of their way to make sure that all the adults are dead and they’re generally very nice guys. I want to hate them for taking so long, but they really do seem to be trying and aren’t just phoning it in.

…and speaking of biting… Another tree fell on our house. The remnants of Ernesto are coming through and it’s been raining all day. It got heavier in the evening. When I got home, it was dark, but I could tell that one of the trees in the side yard will looking a little too horizontal, intersecting with the roof. Lis and G, who were inside at the time, said that they just heard a medium bump about five minutes before I got home. Luckily, nobody was hurt and there appears to be no damage to the house, excepting one smashed but unused satellite dish. I’ll be able to see things better (and take some pictures) in the morning, but judging from the outside and inside inspections (including the attic), the damage is fairly minor. Of course, I called the insurance company, so we’ll probably see our rates fly up, even though the total bill for removal will probably fall under our deductible.

Nope. Turns out that it took only two hours for the bugs to start munching on Lisa. She went to bed around 11PM and around 1AM, just before I headed up, she came marching down all pissed off, showing me the bites. She also found and squashed two of them. I went into the room and within five minutes or so, had caught four more live bugs. The fumigation didn’t work, so we’ve retreated back to the guest room again and will be talking with Protech again.

I have tried to be patient with them. Sure, they apparently made an identification mistake initially and thought our bat bugs were bed bugs. I hear that’s easy to do and they offered to re-fumigate again at no charge, so I’ll cut them some slack. Sure, it costs us around $250 in hotel and laundry charges (all of the laundry and curtains in our master bedroom and the other bedrooms needs to be washed) and that’s not including time any time they fumigate, but everyone make mistakes, even professionals. Where it starts moving from “human” to “incompetent” is now.

If they, ProTech — the exterminators — the bug killers — still can’t kill the bugs even after a second fumigation, then I’m starting to think they just can’t kill bugs. The ProTech people we’ve dealt with have been nice and friendly, but there comes a point where you have to call a spade a spade.

We signed a contract at the outset that covered the initial fumigation and three of four monthly reapplications. It cost around $1700 - $1800 bucks, but we wanted the bugs gone and we wanted them gone yesterday, so we sucked it up and paid. The problem with the contract, though, is that they state that we cannot use (or possibly even consult) any other pest control company without breaking the contract and losing the money we paid. The one exception is “gross negligence” and I’m sure it’d take some pretty bad failure (and possibly a visit to a lawyer) to see that they owe us our money back. The question is, at what point do we say that enough is enough and they’re grossly negligent?

Lis called them today and will be talking with them later about what they plan on doing. The last time, they convinced her that the bites were all in her head. That worked until she found a live one in the bathroom. This time, she’s got some notes and a bag of live bugs, so I hope they’ll be more responsive to fixing up their mistakes.

We have finally put the sheets on the bed in our master bedroom and will be spending the night in our own room for a change. Only six nights after the exterminators fumigated our house for bat bugs (this time), we feel ready to try our bed again. It’s been nice to not worry about bites for a week though. Lis got a plastic zip-up wrapper for the box spring and a fabric zip-up wrapper for the mattress. They’re both for keeping allergens… in? Out? Whatever. Those wrappers along with the poison will hopefully keep the bites away from us tonight.

I haven’t posted anything in a while. Well, I haven’t posted anything here in a while. In my head, I’ve posted a lot of things, but I haven’t quite transcribed the entries from BrainBlog to Pleh’s Wordpress. Things about friends’ weddings, catching up with old girlfriends, parents visiting, work issues, being a dad… many different topics all over here on BrainBlog. Too bad BB only has a readership of one (vs the three of four of this one). What is getting me to post? Bugs.

I’m not talking about the computer kind. I’m talking about real live bugs. More specifically, I’m talking about bedbugs. I’ve been debating on whether or not to post this, but since my dear wife did, I figured I might as well too. The idea of bedbugs makes me feel dirty, like some kind of pariah. Gees, our friend(s) will never want to hang around with us. Heck, lots of people only think they’re fiction. We didn’t know they were real either until Lis decided to look into the strangely linear bite patterns we were seeing just about every morning. (I had one on my right wrist in the shape of a sad “smiley” face.)

It turns out that bedbugs have nothing to do with being dirty and more to do with travel. Sadly, one of our current favorite conversation topics it, “Where do you think we got ‘em?” Lisa thinks we might have come in contact with them on one of our two trips to NY for two different weddings (Albany and Syracuse). I think it might have been Albany or a night at the Tyson’s Corner Ritz we did at the last minute a couple months ago. Either way, it doesn’t change the result.
Lis called the exterminators and had them come check. Yup, bedbugs. They would come back the next day and fog the place. We had to vacate the building for the day and wash all of our clothing, bedding, drapes, etc. What a PITA, but Lis put up with most of it. I took the day off from work and we all drove down the her parents’ place. I stayed there with G while Lis went to the nearby laundromat and did some parallel laundry processing. They stayed there that night and I used Priceline for the first time to find a cheap hotel near work. (Lousy Priceline hooked me up with a Holiday Inn near Dulles, about 23 miles from work.) Of course, this happened a day before my parents would arrive for a one week visit. (Side note: I don’t know about you, but I hear it’s fairly normal for wives to get into a cleaning tizzy before their mother-in-law comes to visit. My wife’s like this. Can you imagine how much having a bedbug infestation heightens the fun?)

The next day, Lis and G return home and throw open the windows to the typically cool Virginia summer, unload laundry, and prep the house for my parents’ arrival. Everything is good right? Well, not so fast. A few days later, we start noticing similar, itchy welts.

When the exterminators came, they said the fogging would kill all the bugs that weren’t eggs, then the four monthly reapplications would get these. They said we shouldn’t get any more bites as it takes more than a month for the bugs to mature enough to get to the biting stage. They also said that we might want to talk with a dermatologist to deal with the welts and that sometimes, people develop an hysterical reaction to having the bugs around. In other words, sometimes you head messes with you.

Given this, we weren’t 100% sure when the welts reappeared. We gave it a few days and the bites kept getting more numerous. Finally, soon after my parents went back to Arizona, when Lis found a bug in the guest bathroom, we accepted the fact that the fogging didn’t kill all the adults. (Saturday morning, around 4AM — the time they’re most active — I woke up and found four more of them of them in a short span of time.)

The past few nights, we have relocated to the guest bedroom, which seems wonderfully unaffected by the bugs in our room. We put up tape barriers in the doorways (they can’t fly or jump) and have been very careful about bringing potentially (albeit unlikely) infested materials into that room. G’s room also seems to be wonderfully unaffected by the bugs.

The exterminators come today to do a reapplication. Hopefully, this will be the real end of it. I’m not sure if we’ll ever be able to trust our bedroom, mattress, box spring, bed, or anything else in there again. I think there’ll always be something “bugging” us in our heads. Anytime we get a mosquito bite, our first thoughts will be, “They’re back!!!!” Moving out seems a bit extreme and a completely new bed seems a bit extravagant too, but maybe that’ll be worth the piece of mind.

Update: I forgot to mention that, luckily, bedbugs aren’t known to transfer any blood bourne illnesses. They’re just really annoying. The bites are generally itchier and longer lasting then a mosquito bite.

Update: We just found out from the exterminators that they’re not bedbugs, but bat bugs. Who knew. Still gotta nukem’ though.