The Scourge Adjacent

You may have noticed that I've been slightly less bloggish this week. There are two main reasons for this. First, my workplace has an annual meeting each year around this time, and this year we had to form groups several weeks before the meeting and prepare a presentation, so I was partly preoccupied by that.

But the bigger reason has to do with the upstairs neighbors. In August one of them moved out, leaving behind a special gift we just learned about this Monday: his bedbug-infested mattress. The upper apartment is on two floors; half the third floor is a bedroom, and the other half is used as an attic space. When the guy left, he tossed his mattress into the attic part, and no one knew about it until last Friday, when someone else attempted to move into the third-floor bedroom. She went into the attic and saw the mattress, and promptly freaked out, completely justifiably. (It probably goes without saying that she won't be moving in after all.)

On Tuesday morning a pest control professional inspected the house and confirmed the presence of the bugs. He also confirmed that our apartment doesn't have any, which was a huge relief, but it won't stay that way unless they treat the whole house as soon as possible. That's going to happen on Saturday.

The prep involves lots and lots of laundry, which then has to be stored in plastic bags. As we do it, we're leaving the bags down in the basement. Everything has to come out of our dresser drawers, the whole place has to be vacuumed, we have to buy a protective mattress cover to use after the treatment, all the furniture has to be moved out away from the walls, and all the switch and outlet plates have to be unscrewed from the walls, so the insecticide can get inside. We have to be away from the apartment for eight hours, but we're going to go stay at my mother's overnight and return the next day.

We're more than a bit shell-shocked by all this, but we're trying to deal with it. I would advise all of you to be vigilant and do what you can to protect yourselves.