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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.