sleep tight, don't let the...

so we have bed bugs. and though i've often said that i'd kill myself if we ever got any, i'm obv still here to tell the tale.

don't ask where we got them, we're not sure. our place is clean, we never bring furniture in from outside and neither of us sleep in other beds all that often.

we may have gotten them from another apt but i'm praying that's not the case as we'd likely just keep getting them back after the extermination. the owners and mgt company refuse to pay for an exterminator so that means i'll have to take him to court to get the money. i'm in the process of trying to organize my building to find out for certain who has them and who doesn't to see if i can compel a building-wide extermination.

prep for extermination requires washing everything you own, bagging it up tightly and emptying every piece of furniture you have. i am a clothes whore so this has been particularly tedious for me but it has forced me to do a long overdue, over haul of my wardrobe. my rule: if you haven't worn it in 3 years and if it isn't designer, toss it.

i got rid of about 7 garbage bags full of stuff. i'd also like to note that i tried long and hard to find some non-profit to take my clothes but nobody wanted to have to wash them. i was not feeling charitable enough to pay to wash them myself and haul all 7 bags back up to my 5th floor walk-up.

so i'm keeping about 15 bags of stuff, all of which i'm now stuffing into these sucky inny bags that i'm obsessed with at the moment. also, you don't literally have to wash all your clothes, it's the heat that kills bugs so throwing dry clothes in a drier for 10 minutes does the trick.

other tricks of the trade: rubbing alcohol kills bed bug eggs, spray everything you own with it. putting the legs of your bed in little dishes of baby oil will keep any bugs from climbing into your bed as long as it's pulled away from all walls/dressers and they can't climb in another way.

it's been the biggest pain in the ass and has been consuming, to say the least, but all the house cleaning has been therapeutic and i've been impressed with my own level-headedness these past few days.

at first i thought, "how could this happen to me?!" then i started hearing about more and more people who also have them. seems they've become a bit of an epidemic lately. a miserable, gross epidemic.