school vacation week recap

since i didn't write anything at all while we were in maine, i'll fill you all in on what happened there. i'll start with our trip up and work forward from there. maggie is asleep right now, so i'll write until she wakes up.

actually, i'm going to start with the monday before we went to maine--monday, april 6. i got a phone call from donna (the woman at the co-op management office) saying that the apartment next to us has bedbugs. BEDBUGS! bedbugs are the plague of astoria these days. they live in your mattress and suck your blood while you sleep. their bites can be like mosquito bites, all itchy, red and swollen. apparently they are notoriously hard to kill, and fumigating to get rid of them is ridiculously complex. so, donna said that the exterminator would be over within an hour to inspect our apartment for them. bedbugs can cross from apartment to apartment, but i don't (didn't) know how easily, so i didn't know whether we might actually have a problem or not. since no one had been bitten, things looked ok. but still scary.

well, the exterminator came and found no evidence of bedbugs. he said they'll leave little droppings on the mattress, especially in the seams, and that's a tell-tale sign. we had no little droppings. woo hoo! i breathed a sigh of relief and went to pick up nina at school.

that night we ate dinner at the diner. when we got home, there was an envelope on our door. actually, it was on bob's door, but it had our name on it and i was expecting to hear from the co-op about the bedbugs, so i took it. the letter said that the co-op recommended exterminating even though we didn't seem to have any bedbugs. the list of things we had to do to prepare for extermination was crazy-- remove everything from every surface and drawer, and wash everything in the apartment in hot water and dry on hot.

in the morning, i called donna and she sent the exterminator and head maintainence guy, marcel, over to talk. marcel said the wall between our apartment and the neighboring one is at least 2 inches thick and as far as he knows, none of the walls in the complex have cracks going through them. the exterminator had already told me bedbugs can cross through sheetrock but not through plaster or concrete walls. we decided just in case to have the seam of the common wall sprayed and the outlets on that wall, just in case any bedbugs found a crack to crawl through.

so far, so good. i did wake up one night in maine with a few of my eczema hot spots itching like crazy, which made me worry that we had bedbugs and had brought them to maine, but it was just eczema.

well, maggie is up and i haven't even gotten to our trip! more to come...