Away, ye critters

Yesterday was Extermination Day. We had spent the prior week washing all of our clothing and sealing it up plastic bags. Most of the clothing now sits in large plastic bags, to remain unworn for the next few weeks. The essentials -- a handful of shirts, pants, underwear, socks, running clothes -- are in large ziploc bags that will sit in our dresser drawers. When we have determined that our long, national bedbug nightmare is over, we can take all of the clothes out of the bags and resume normal living. Cathleen fantasizes about living in this downscaled manner in perpetuity, but she is crazy. We all know that.

Ben the Exterminator arrived at a little after 9:30 in the morning. Ben has been to our home a couple of times before to deal with what we like to call "the mouse problem." Ben seals up holes, and "the mouse problem" goes away. Bedbugs, of course, don't respect the seal-up-the-hole method, and they require a good dose of toxic juice. Ben came armed with toxic juice.

When we first scheduled an exterminator to come, Cathleen asked what insecticides they'd be using. We were told they'd be spraying something in the walls -- one of three frighteningly named poisons: Suspend, Bedlam or Tri-Di. Then they'd spray Steri-Fab on the surface areas in the room. I called my brother-in-law, John, who has a Masters in Industrial Hygiene, and asked him to weigh in on whether it was judicious to have these things sprayed in the midst of our young children. John, bless his toxicologically-educated soul, did some quick research and gave us enough information that we felt comfortable having our home so insecticided. John also seemed to suggest that we were doing a greater disservice to our children's health by raising them in the big city. John, you country bumpkin.

Well, when Ben the Exterminator arrived, Cathleen asked what he'd be using that day. "Onslaught" was his reply.

I am a total sucker for a good name. Onslaught, however, is not a good name.

We then set about calling John (no answer), researching Onslaught on the web, calling the company that makes Onslaught, and having a mini-conference call with Mike the Exterminator Boss. We learned little, except that Onslaught is a residual insecticide. This is a good thing to have when dealing with bedbugs, because when you inevitably miss the eggs or the larvae that are hidden in crevices somewhere, when they grow up and venture out the poison is still there for the killing. This seems like a bad thing when you have young children and small dogs who might venture amongst the poison. Like we do.

Ben the Exterminator does not have much of a bedside manner. He looks a bit like all of the kids in my high school that came from Putnam Valley, which is to say that he looks like he just came home from a Megadeth concert. Long hair and a dour demeanor, except that Ben is in his forties, and not an angst-ridden 15-year-old. He is a bit rough around all of the edges, and was unapologetically impatient with our chemicals-might-be-harmful paranoia. I eventually explained that we had two concerns: getting rid of the bugs, and protecting our children's health, and that he had better respect that. He finally calmed down enough to focus on working out a solution, and we ultimately decided that he'd spray the hell out of our room but nowhere else; he'd put traps in the kid's room and under our couch, and if we later found bugs in them, we'd have to revisit our gameplan.

I then worked with Ben in our bedroom, moving furniture and the like. First he unscrewed the lightswitches and outlets and sprayed stuff into the walls. Then he sprayed all over our bedframe, and throughout our dressers (in every drawer, etc.). I took apart our four-piece "lawyer's bookshelves" and spied a live bedbug sitting happily in the crevice where two of the component pieces meet -- eeeewww. Ben sprayed every piece. He then sprayed the base of the wall, where it meets the carpet, all along the perimeter of the room. And that was it. He then checked around in Sophie and Joseph's apartment for signs of bedbugs (nothing visible), and did the same in the basement. And then he sprayed in the rental apartment because they recently started seeing roaches. Total bill: $500.

Having confirmed that our lawyer's bookshelves were infested by at least one bedbug (and no doubt others), I was concerned that the 30 or 40 books in those shelves were perhaps laden with eggs. So I bagged up the books and stuck them in our freezer where they will sit for a couple of days. Bedbugs can't survive in the freezing temperatures, and so we have a little Francine Prose and Jonathan Lethem squeezed in between our sun dried tomato ravioli and our espresso-ground Gorilla coffee.

Cathleen and I had earlier talked about sleeping that first night in the basement, but I convinced her that it would be safe to sleep in our apartment. Max, however, was so excited to sleep in the basement that it really wasn't even up for discussion. Kids are weird. So we celebrated the first night of Chanukah and then slept in our basement. A great miracle happened there...