Category: Personal

This will be a short post. We have left the bedbugs far behind.

After retreating from our apartment and moving in with my very generous In-Laws we had a couple scares, but they always turned out to be a similar-looking insect, or a bite that looked similar to the bite of a bedbug.

After about a month, we are reasonably confident that we never took a single bedbug to my in-laws. So if we didn’t get rid of them all by leaving, then they only exist now in the storage unit- which also has the best poison against bedbugs that a consumer can buy, in concentrations much higher than necessary.

SO, aside from a few minor considerations, the bedbugs are behind us.

During the first month that we were at my in-laws, my first tech assignment ended. I’m working through a recruiter, so when an assignment ended, he finds me new work. 2 weeks later I am working for the government – specifically at a military base/supply depot doing an upgrade for 100% of their Windows 7 machines to Windows 10.

That assignment lasts 2 months. It didn’t pay particularly well, but it pays better (and is better for me) than maybe-sometimes standing on asphalt.

During these 2 months we are looking for a place to move. and near the end of these 2 months we find a place that has these qualities:

1. Safe. Mainly the neighborhood, but also the structure.
2. No recent history of any major bug problems.
3. Decent landlord – we kept finding these really skeezy companies that were just way to sketchy for us to be comfortable.
4. Fits our budget. Which is about $850/month on the upper end

In the late winter/early spring it is practically impossible to satisfy all of these requirements. We ended up learning that friends of ours were moving out – we’ve known them for a long time. The vouched for all of these, and is wasn’t great for all of these, but it did minimally satisfy all of them. Only it’s not actually available until July 1st.

The next major thing that happened was that my assignment ended. And then I had a month off of work. HOLY CRAP: A month out of work was not what we needed right now, especially since we had just signed a new lease. The 1st week off was applying for every. single. job. that existed with any sort of “easy apply” on a variety of websites (like linkedin and it’s cousins). The 2nd week was being contacted by a handful of I.T. recruiters for skype interviews and a few in-person initial interviews. The third week was a few more interviews with recruiters*. Week 4 was FINALLY, some real interviews. Uhh… 4 interviews in 2 days, specifically. I do not suggest that many stressful meetings in so few days.

It was a stressful Wednesday and Thursday, but at the end of the week, I had a job at the Abercrombie & Fitch home office doing some stuff in their I.T. department. About which I will make a new post later.

SO, as of writing this post I have been at A&F almost 3 weeks, and I’m collecting my first paycheck on Friday. The Saturday immediately after, I am moving in to a new house.

For the next month I am going to be slowly making sure that 100% of the books I have in storage are bedbug – free, and turning our new house in to a place that we want to live and thrive.

*These interviews were not for jobs, but rather they were for me to prove that the recruiting agency wanted me.

So, my last post was basically just an accounting of my time from the discovery of a bedbug infestation and when I decided that I still needed to act like I have a website, whether or not the bedbugs wanted me to have a life. The previous post was about 2 months ago. So, time for an update, I guess.

We have still not managed to wrest our household from the clutches of these ancient nocturnal vampires. Every time that we would get a spray done, we would make sure to emphasize to the exterminator where we think they are coming from and our willingness to do whatever we can to just kill the little fuckers. Torching the building is something I would love to do if they let us (they don’t).

And every time we got another spray done, it would be about 2 weeks before we found more ‘live activity.’ And we would get another spray done. And another. And another. We did this for MONTHS. The techs told us that we were likely looking at a nest that was either in the sub-floor under our master bedroom, or in the wall that we shared with our closest neighbor (and yes – they also found bedbugs, pretty much the first time that it occurred to them to look). This means that no amount of spraying is ever going to directly contact the ones that have recently fed. And just in case you didn’t know, if a recently-fed bedbug just decides not to move for a while, it can survive twelve months without feeding again. To be even more horrific, if there is a bedbug larva that hatches at the very end of that time period, it can feed on the almost-dead adult, and survive for another six months.

That’s eighteen months of bedbugs just chilling in the walls, refusing to come out, safe from the poison, and in a place that would be very hard to heat-treat properly.

The last time that we had the exterminator come out to spray, they coated our master bedroom in poison so thoroughly that we didn’t feel safe sleeping the room – just walking through the room kicked up enough poison powder that I could taste it. So Amanda and I slept on an air mattress. For a week.

After a week reality came and smacked me upside the head. I was sitting down and thinking that I didn’t want to inflate the bed again, and realized that we wouldn’t go in our master bedroom at all, except to grab clothes. And Lily’s room was basically just clothes storage and a sleeping bunk – we didn’t want her playing with any of the toys up there, because even a little bit of poison on something that she might decide to swallow is a bad thing.

So we decided that we needed to leave. The bedbugs had won. We would sound a full retreat and do whatever we could to simply get out of this stupid situation. Luckily, we had two huge things in our favor:

#1: A support network. I have 2 brothers, both married, that live in town. some 90% of Amanda’s extended family lives within 1 county of Columbus. We are in a church where people really care about one another and are willing to sacrifice. We also have other friends that either put up with us or that we’ve done big favors for in the past.

#2: Our landlord decided to raise rent. Normally that’s an illegal thing if we aren’t signing a new lease, BUT there’s a strange line in our lease that allows our rental company to raise rent in the middle, as long as they give us notice and give us the opportunity to leave before it takes effect. So basically we can break our lease with no real consequences or black mark on our rental history.

So now I am living with my wonderful in-laws. They are empty-nesters and have 2 rooms that they keep basically as guest bedrooms. Lily is now in one, and Amanda and I are in the other. They don’t have a lot of extra space beyond that, so a bunch of the stuff we know we can treat is in a storage unit near our apartment. Just yesterday we had a “moving” day where a few friends came over and we threw a bunch of shit on the curb.

The bedbugs won. We are left as not-quite-homeless, dependent upon the good will of our family and friends. We are left with quite a lot of possessions, even though we can’t reasonably access them in a timely manner. We are left with a very small amount of furniture – we only saved a baker’s rack, a weird half-shelf thing that fits our TV perfectly, one small shelf that was constructed by Amanda’s late grandfather, and a very nice coffee table, which was left to Amanda when her grandmother died. We are saving our entire book collection – we will be aggressively sterilizing it all with pesticides and maybe heat (again). We are saving a buttload of clothes – but probably donating a bunch of that, too.

What the bedbugs take from us? They got 6 months of our peace of mind. They managed to enforce a very strange social isolation upon us. They killed our mattress/box spring, Lily’s crib, and all 3 couches. They killed every dresser we own. They killed 5 full-size shelving units, ranging in quality from “wal-mart special” to “wait did someone hand-make this?”  They have forced me to work at maintaining proper bedbug containment protocol more than I work at my job. They killed my nerd fort. They have almost 100% removed any activity that isn’t strictly survival for the last 6 months. They took my health: even if the poison was aimed at the bedbugs – I’ve still been sick more in the last 6 months than I had been in the 2 years previous to that.

Yesterday when I was looking at the pile of (now) trash in front of my house, I began mentally adding up what it would be like to re-purchase all that furniture. Just what I was looking at was easily $3,000. I began to add up the rest of the furniture and time spent and the heat treatment and poison and everything else that these horrid little beasties took. At around $10,000 I stopped counting because I was already despairing.

The last post I published was just after thanksgiving. That’s almost a 2 months ago, and it didn’t include anything that had to do with my podcast(s). I have a few episodes that are in the state of ‘almost done,’ but I’ve decided to keep my hiatus going until some things have been finished.

First off, to set the stage: I had been thinking for a while that I wanted to start an I.T. career. After a dozen disjointed jobs that I never really cared about, I figured I would start studying for the Comptia A+ certification. So I got a few books from the library and started working my way through them.

If you don’t want to read 100%, there’s a TL;DR at the bottom.

BEGIN WEEK #1:

Shortly after I decide to get A+ certified, starting about 3-ish weeks before Thanksgiving, my wife found a small colony of bedbugs on our bed’s box spring. It was a very small colony, with only 3 or 4 live adults and a small amount of eggs. But if you’ve ever had bedbugs before, or even known someone who has had them, you know that this is one of the more stressful things that can happen to you, outside of a major life event or major surgery (NO REALLY, HERE’S A LINK).

We discovered them on Thursday November 3, about 11:30 pm. We didn’t get to sleep until about 3 am. In that time we stripped our bed and all our clothes and started ‘heat-treating’ them. Which in this case is code for “stick ’em in the dryer for the longest, hottest setting.” We also inspected the crib and mattress that our toddler sleeps on. We slept on the couches that night. I awoke early that morning for work, and Amanda had to call off work because taking a toddler to daycare from a bedbug infested home with other children is considered impolite.

Friday after I was home from work, we decided to temporarily move in to my in-law’s house. I thought we might spend a week there. I was wrong about the time frame, but I cannot thank them enough for their support.

BEGIN WEEK #2:

This week was interesting and horrible. I was still working, only now I was 20 more minutes from my office, so I had to wake up even earlier. Every day after work I would head to the apartment and bag up clothes, make terrible jokes while I baked my novels on a low setting (Heh. “cooking my books” – get it?), and generally set everything in any room in one weird tower of crap in the middle of that room. We came up with a system to ensure that we wouldn’t bring bugs from our apartment to anywhere else – it had to do with a package of clothes in the entryway to the in-law’s house, carrying a spray bottle of isopropyl alcohol wherever we go, and generally being paranoid.

This is the first full week that we are at the in-laws, and I don’t have access to my normal computer, normal video games, or generally speaking, my normal life. I decide that I am going to take whatever toddler-free time that I have and read this A+ book. So I am usually the last person awake, reading alone at the dining room table, with the dogs and the fireplace for company. It’s pretty nice, and a perfect study atmosphere for me.

Amanda and I love to host for our friends, so we have a lot of furniture. Getting every single piece of furniture 2+ feet way from the apartment’s walls was impossible, but we came close, without even destroying anything. Before we didn’t want to be in our apartment because we didn’t want to be around the bugs. Now we didn’t want to because it was totally uninhabitable. No seating, all the food moved or thrown away, the bedding all piled up, and so forth. Even my books were in a jenga tower of boxes.

BEGIN WEEK #3

We left the goddamned country.

No – really, we had a cruise scheduled for the last full week before thanksgiving. My dad paid for it as a 5th anniversary gift. My brother and his wife also came. The week previous was hell because we were trying to get our home ready for the bedbug treatment before we left. So we got it all done, and we headed to my dad’s place in Pennsylvania before heading to Baltimore to catch the ship.

(By the way, I recommend going on a cruise. They are cheaper than you might think, and are a really good way of going somewhere new without needing to think about things like making food for yourself or deciding what to do during the day.)

On the cruise we went to Port Canaveral (including NASA), and then Nassau and Freeport – both of which are in The Bahamas.

It was weird, going on a trip like this when my home was being held hostage by a parasite. It was also weird being away from my daughter for so long (we had already arranged to have the in-laws watching her). It was weird knowing that the landlord had arranged to have the exterminators there when we were going to be 1100 miles south. It was weird going to a country that was recovering from a hurricane that hit them so hard that they still weren’t done cleaning up after a month. It was weird that I was worried about insects when some of these people were worried about what to eat tomorrow.

My brain was in a weird place. In my free time (which was like 90% of your time on a cruise) I read up on A+ stuff.

BEGIN WEEK #4:

We got back to Columbus.

My job was cutting hours, since no one wants to work outside in freezing temperatures (I am a traffic control flagger for road construction sites). I had a lot of free time and the only things to do was slowly unpack our house from the middle of every room, and wait for the exterminator to do the final spray. Oh, and read A+ stuff.

I worked when I could, but otherwise, I was not in my own home, and couldn’t do my normal things. I played with the toddler, and read A+ stuff. I finished my first read-through of the book on Friday.

Oh yeah. Thanksgiving also happened in there somewhere.

BEGIN WEEK #5:

We move back home.

We are still trying to get the house put back together. It’s going slowly. Nerd Fort #1 had been mostly dismantled, since it is a blanket fort, and bed bugs like cloth. We keep being paranoid about the chances that the treatments missed a bug or two. It’s stressful – like moving, only with horrible little blood goblins that are rumored to have the ability to just not die.

BEGIN WEEK #6:

It is now the first full week of December. We start finishing up the details of our Christmas trip to South Dakota, because it doesn’t matter how broke or parasite-stricken you are – when it’s time for someone’s 60th wedding anniversary, you are going to it.

We are continuing to get our house back in order, and we start getting bills that we were expecting – urgent care visit for me when a stomach virus made me not eat for three days, emergency room visit for Amanda when belly pain woke her up from a dead sleep, the first notice of how much the bedbug treatment will cost, etc.

Otherwise, I worked when I could, took care of the toddler when I couldn’t, and studied A+ stuff in between.

BEGIN WEEK #7:

I actually work this week. Like real, actual hours. at least 3 days. Get more bills. Get paranoid some more. Try to figure out what to get people for Christmas on a budget (hint – a lot of it was knitting).

We have our first Christmas get-together as my father comes in to town on Saturday the 17th. The kids (Lily and the 2 children of my older brother) get most of the presents, which is the way it should be.

We finish the plans for flying out to South Dakota, and start getting packed up.

BEGIN WEEK #8:

On Sunday, Amanda’s phone deletes most of her pictures and videos, including some videos of Lily that were never sent to anyone else. The next day we get the best phone for under $100 that we can find. We can barely afford this, but I have worked recently.

On Tuesday, we fly out to South Dakota. Did you know that if your child is under 2 years old, you can register them as “babe in arms,” and they fly for free? I do now, but here’s the kicker – the child has to share your seat. We decided that flying was better than driving because a long flight out with a toddler is a WAY shorter stress-period than a 24-driving-hours car trip.

Pro-tip #1: bring something that can play their favorite movie, but only break out the movie when they can’t keep themselves still any longer. Pro-tip #2: have a brother that wants to bring their vehicle, so you can just give them the luggage that you would otherwise check with the airline. Pro-tip #3: don’t get a stomach bug while on the airplane, especially with a toddler.

We get out to South Dakota and it’s pretty cool. We have wonderful bacon from a small-town-butcher with eggs and toast Every. Single. Morning. It was great. We also learn that my brother and I (and our families) are the surprise for the anniversary party. So we spend time driving around the Black Hills seeing really cool things. Went to Wind Cave. Nifty stuff. Somehow we didn’t go see Mount Rushmore.

My maternal grandparent’s wedding shared it’s decorations with their church’s Christmas service in 1956. The anniversary party 60 years later did the same thing, at the same church. That was pretty cool. When my grandfather came in and realized who he was looking at, I was worried that he was going to have a heart attack right there at the church. He hasn’t seen us since my younger brother’s wedding, and they had no idea we were coming. They very much appreciated our presence.

BEGIN WEEK #9:

Christmas Sunday! Wake up and do presents and stuff, which makes this Christmas Celebration #2. Start to hear about a blizzard coming. Go to my Mom’s church around noonish for their Christmas service. It was cheesy and Christmas-y, just like they always are, no matter what church you go to.

Blizzard happens, 2-3 feet of snow with 6 foot drifts. The entire town was cleaned up before dawn the very next day, because people from South Dakota don’t screw around with winters that last for maybe half the year. The next day we go to the spot where my Stepdad proposed to my mom  – Bridal Veil Falls.

Fly back to Columbus on Tuesday. Realize on the way back that I didn’t study A+ at all when I was in South Dakota.

Tuesday night, as we are getting ready for bed – find a bedbug. OGODDAMITTSONOFABITCH.

Call the landlord again. Call the exterminators again. Check every inch of the bed. Break out the DE (diatemaceous earth) in full force, dusting the entire bedroom.

Start a study group for like-minded A+ people. Sundays and Wednesdays. No one shows, but I keep going and maintain my study time.

BEGIN WEEK #10

New Years Day! Time to fight some bedbugs. We are sleeping on an air mattress in our living room, because the bugs seem to be centralized in our bedroom. I put a ring of DE around the air mattress at night. Lily loves helping deflate the air mattress in the morning. Capture a bedbug in the bedroom so we can show it to the exterminator.

Exterminator comes out, and says “yeah. That’s live activity,” when looking at our bug-in-a-ziploc. This apparently means something special and he basically tells us to get out because he’s going to “make it pretty toxic in here.” (don’t worry, the poison is harmless to humans after it dries – just have to keep the toddler from eating it too much).

We start sleeping in the bedroom again after the spray.

Work when I can. Study when I can’t.

BEGIN WEEK #11

Find another 2 bedbugs, capture them. Pay a few bills. Start to realize exactly how crazy we are going because of these little blood-sucking shits. Work 3 days this week (yay money) immediately pay some bills.

This time we take what we’ve learned and use alcohol to kill anything alive that we didn’t catch and can’t see (like eggs and stuff), DE to kill anything that might crawl up on the bed, and duct tape to patch up the holes that are in the bedbug-proof mattress cover.

Another spray: the exterminator looks at the 2 bugs and says “yeah that one is probably 7 weeks old, and that one is probably 3 weeks. I’m going to straight up soak your apartment in poison. Also, all the crazy things you are doing are very good. Keep it up.”

Also keep up the study group. No one comes. I still study.

BEGIN WEEK #12

This is the week that I am posting this.

Holy crap it’s been nearly 3 months. We are a little crazy, which I think Lily is picking up on – she is acting out more. We have a bit of money because Ohio weather has an on-again-off-again relationship with winter, so I work more (today is 60 degrees!). The in-laws keep doing their incredibly supportive thing.

I have a day off that Amanda is working and Lily spends with the great-grandparents. So I sit down and write this. I’m going to pay more bills and do more paperwork and get caught up on dishes.

END OF THE STORY.

TL;DR?
-Bedbugs are a horrific blight on the health and sanity of the world.
-We are fighting them while traveling, while trying to maintain a clean and financially-sound household, while trying to work, and while raising a toddler.
-We are slowly winning the bedbug battle, but it is not yet won.
-I have decided that getting my A+ certification is more important than keeping up with the podcast, but some podcast stuff will be ready the moment I feel I am qualified for the A+.

CONCLUSION: I am still on hiatus, but I am getting closer to being done with that.

And that really sucks.

The following is a comment from a reddit thread. I suggest reading the thread until you get to this one, but this one is the most important thing I’ve read recently.

Fuck, I have been battling bedbugs for three weeks, and I was ready to crucify the people in the original picture just like everyone else. But once I got to the end of that comment:

“…Everyone is doing their best. If they are doing a bad job it’s because they don’t know how to do it better. Whether it’s knowledge, depression, mental illness, shitty upbringing. It’s their best, as terrible as it may be.”

It makes me remember the fact that I graduated from college right when people with my degree had been flooding back in to my industry after they took a break during the financial crisis. I have since abandoned any hope of getting back to any kind of social service/mental health unless I become independently wealthy. Since then I’ve been jumping from one job to another, just to keep my household afloat – and even that is once again coming under fire. If you look at my resume` without really asking “why in the world has this guy been in traffic control and in a preschool?” then many people would assume that I just can’t hold a proper job long-term. The truth is that I have had to face really hard facts at really inconvenient moments in my life.

My point is: I’m doing my best, but I often get nervous that people don’t always see that – I get nervous they will see me as lazy. Or as ‘not motivated’. Or as ‘entitled’. Or even as ‘just another loser’. But goddamit, I’m doing my best. I need to be making more money, but man there are some really important things that I’ve had to sacrifice. Sometimes the thing I have to give up is financial security. It’s a lot better to give that up and rest easy than to know that you weren’t there when someone depended on you. For me, that trade has leveled a hefty bill in my direction, but I think it’s been worth it.

So, I find myself at the end of a week, when I would normally be finishing editing an episode and releasing it. I would normally be hoping that the few people who I know listen to it (Hi, Ellie and Claire!) will get something entertaining and interesting out of it.

Turns out, that I only have about 15 minutes of session 2 remaining – I did not plan this well. The final few minutes are kinda important but not exactly the sort of thing that stands on their own. I will probably have a weird half-episode next time I get a day off to edit stuff, and release it along with the first episode of Session 3. But for now, no episode for the moment.

Speaking of Session 3, I am sure that anyone who has listened to sessions 1 and 2 have noticed that all the episodes in Session 2 are significantly shorter than those in Session 1. I am specifically planning on making one big change like that each session, and Session 3 will have a change as well – D&D stories.

So, I know that everyone has that one amazing story that they always tell their friends. That one character whom you managed to be build just right and still maintain that one thing that makes them special. That one session that had people literally falling out of their chairs in shock. That one prop that got the players so invested in their character that the campaign lasted for 3 years. That one adventure that gave you nightmares for a week. That story – the one you cannot stand not telling to any RPG nerd that wanders by.

I want to take some of these stories, and include them in my podcast. I will start with the stories from myself and the guys in the group so far. Hopefully, I will be able to solicit stories from others soon, as well. In the episode, the stories will be after the main content, and hopefully around 5-10 minutes long.

If you are reading this and would like to submit your story, then write it up and email me (seth.kleinpaste@stumblestoryinn.com) with the subject line “Nerd Fort Story.” It would be nice to get people in to Nerd Fort #1 to record it yourself, but if time or geography doesn’t allow it, then I will voice it, possibly with the amazing voice talents of the Nerd Fort Guys, and maybe all our friends.

So that’s that. I still plan on getting more text posts about stuff out on a regular basis, but that will probably be when my work calms down a little in winter. Otherwise, I’m going to just be chugging along with the podcast.