Choking heat & bedbugs

Wow, the temp has finally started to fall as evening approaches, down to 107 (from 108). Looking ahead, I'd better dig out my sweaters before Friday gets here, expected high only 96. Brrrrrr!

Grumpy was sent home on Thursday (6/3), and he is recovering nicely. His incapacitation was neatly timed to avoid having to spring into action this weekend for the bedbug war. I have been so grossed out and freaked out by this development. I have lived 64 years without a bedbug bite or even seeing one of the little buggers but have now lost my bedbug virginity. I suspect my habit of toting my squishy down pillow on road trips was the cause. I just hope I picked them up on my way home. Otherwise, my Tulsa cousin Hooly may be nursing a permanent grudge by now. Maybe it was that little motel in Groom, TX.

It was, oh, three or four days ago that I found the first varmint sucking my blood. Grumpy and I were sleeping crossways on our kingsize bed with me nearest the wall and him at the foot for easy on/off maneuvers. (His usual side of the bed is so cluttered -- no, filled -- with piles of crap and dust and food bits that he has to scoot to the foot of the bed to get off it. No way that's happening with a hole in his chest.) Anyhow, that left me in bedbug barricade position. Reaching to scratch an itch, I caught it moving, squeezed, turned on the light and saw blood. My first idea was that I had brought in some ticks from our neglected back yard. The next night, another one, larger, looking segmented. Are baby ticks segmented? I dunno. Finally I grabbed one for a better look and consulted a pest photo identification page on the internet. Bedbug! Shit!!!

I read up on bedbugs, stripped the bed, washed bedding in hot water & dried in hot drier and ran to the store for spray, then to Ace Hardware for better spray, and started trying to call pest control companies on a Sunday. I would have hauled the bed out to the back yard and set it on fire if I'd been strong enough to do it by myself. Then I visualized dropping bedbugs all the way out to the back yard, through the kitchen and dining room -- not a pretty picture. Grumpy slept on the sofa, me in the guest bedroom at the other end of the house. After more research and conversations with both dumb and smart pest people, and with visible bugs at least immobilized if not dead, I am breathing normally again, feeling somewhat calm. Tomorrow the expert will come. And he'll be back in a week to get the hatchlings. And we don't have to throw out the bed and buy a new one (though that still sounds like the best idea to me). I'm going to a movie.