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.