Last week...

Last week was one of the most ridiculous weeks of my semester.  The last week of classes is usually somewhat stressful, but this was just bad. I had to do a 10 page paper (on the decline of the Golden Age of Islam), 4 forum posts on Muslims in America, read and translate a 3 page article in Arabic, a 2 page book review, a 10 minute skit in Arabic, an hour-long online test in Arabic, a 5 minute poetry recitation in Arabic, a revised essay in Arabic, and all of that on top of my regular class and work schedule.  So needless to say, I had pretty much every waking minute of my life that week scheduled.

But the fun didn't stop there!  A little background information: for roughly the last month and a half, the upper half of my body, especially my arms and shoulders, has been covered in huge, red, itchy welts.  I had no idea why.  The doctors thought it could be hives, so I was taking antihistamines and putting steroid cream on the welts, but to no avail.  They kept getting worse.  Then, a couple weeks ago I went to the mountains with my college group from church.  And what do you know, all the welts disappeared.  So I thought then that I was either allergic to something in my comforter or my mattress.  When I got home, I told Jeff, and we decided to eliminate the mattress first.  So we moved the mattress, kept the comforter, slept on the air mattress.  The first night, no new welts.  Hallelujah!  The second night, however, new welts.  So we prepared to put the mattress back, switch the comforter instead.  And that's when we saw it: a bug.  On the wall.  A tick?  No, the head was wrong for ticks.  A quick image search made my stomach drop: bedbugs.  We ran over to the mattress, and immediately found several crawling on it.  They were on the ceiling, along the baseboards, on the walls, all over the mattress, in the curtains, in the wall sockets.  Infested.  I was confused at first, because I was the only one getting bit.  But it turns out that a) bedbugs don't like to bite people who move a lot in their sleep, which Jeff definitely does, and b) apparently women tend to give off more heat than men, so they're frequently more attracted to women.  Lucky Jeff.

Our immediate reaction: collect them in a jar and kill them.  And then show them to the landlord as proof

In case you needed a closer look...

We quickly took the mattress out to the dumpster, and went to tell the landlord the next morning.  The landlord told us we had to wait 5 days until the next time the fumigator came, so we camped out on a air mattress in the only room without bugs - the living room.  The fumigator was scheduled to come last Tuesday, right in the middle of my ridiculously crazy week.  To prepare, we had to bag up all the clothes, empty the closets, take down the curtains, move all the furniture to the middle of the room - basically move out of the place.  So of course, adding that stress to my already stressful week meant frequent breakdowns.  

preparing for fumigation

The bedbug debacle is not yet over - the fumigator came back this Tuesday to spray again, but I got several more bites that night, so he's coming a third time next week to spray again.  So, yeah, it was a crazy week.