Success!!

To those of you who followed the instructions I offered in a previous post for a non-chemical approach to killing roaches in your home, I hope you were as successful as I was! The majority of the roaches in my apartment have died as a result of the recipe I used (mushed up hardboiled egg sprinkled with boric acid).

This method was far more effective than the roach fogger, especially since I did not need to vacate my home for several hours for my own safety, as I would have with the fogger. Also, roach fogger has the negative side effect of irritating, not killing bed bugs, and causing them to scatter throughout the home and laying eggs in multiple, sometimes far-flung areas of your home as a result.

Although bed bugs are far more bothersome than roaches, nobody likes to have roaches in their home. And I'm glad I found a more effective and safer roach killing alternative to any spray fogger out there on the market.

To those of you who haven't tried the aforementioned recipe to kill roaches, I seriously suggest you do so and share the results on Bugged Out.

Good luck!

The Battle Continues…

M recently found a tiny cluster of bed bugs in a black plastic bag that had fallen into a space between my solid wood armoire.

Three weeks ago we already got5 rid of a very nice wooden dresser because we found bed bugs living upside down in the underbelly of the dresser’s drawers themselves. This week we determined that our other wooden dresser needs to go as well, as we have spotted bed bugs crawling in and around the dresser.

Our solution? Plastic dressers. We already purchased a three-draw plastic dresser for about $30 at BJ’s Wholesale Club, but because they are smaller than the two wooden ones we need two more to replace the old dressers. Currently, our washed clothes are lying in stacks on the living room coffee table because there is literally no place to put them away in our bedroom.

The clusters of bugs we found in the dressers were tiny, and could hardly be compared to the teeming colonies I discovered more than a year ago and chose to throw out my mattress, bed and headboard. But I learned my lesson: take care of a small problem before it grows into a bigger one. Perhaps if I had followed that advice a year ago, I might still have my bed furniture today.

So continues the war between bed bugs and the urban dwellers seeking to drive them out of their home.

Until next time…

Roaches and Bed Bugs

A neighbor told me what she does to rid her apartment of roaches, and I decided to try it. As one exterminator opined in a previous post, those of us who have roaches as well as bed bugs have found that foggers designed to kill roaches end up irritating bed bugs and scattering them further throughout your home. This does not kill or even harm the bed bugs, but instead makes it that much harder to ensure that you've killed all the bed bugs in your home when you do go after them.

Obviously, an effective roach-killing method that won't affect bed bugs in any way (until I'm ready to kill them) interested me, as I do have both roaches as well as bed bugs. So here is what my neighbor told me to do:

Boil some eggs, then remove the shell and mash up the insides (yolk and white) with a fork. Then add a generous amount of boric acid onto the mashed egg. Using the same fork, lay a few pieces of this mixture onto the kitchen sink, behind the toilet bowl or anywhere else in your home you've seen roaches.

The beauty of this, of course, is that it effectively kills the roaches (and it does, I tried it out last week) without disturbing the bed bugs. That way the bed bug will never see it coming when you actually do go after them.

I advise anyone to try this hard-boiled egg/boric acid mixture in their homes as an alternative to roach fogger which, as I've witnessed firsthand and many people have told me, will only irritate and scatter the bed bugs.

Good luck, and happy hunting!

Crunch, Crunch, Crunch...

Hi all,

I'm sifting through my bed bug-related Google alerts, looking for blogging material for Bugged Out and I'm eating Tostitos with salsa. It suddenly occurs to me that I must truly be desensitized to the "eewww factor" of bed bugs if I'm eating while reading about bed bugs and browsing through magnified images of the multi-legged creatures.

I'm not sure when exactly I stopped being creeped out by bed bugs. I remember this time a year ago, just thinking about them made me lose my appetite. I remember when I first saw a picture of bed bugs and started gagging at the notion that these tiny, disgusting things were crawling all over me and sucking my blood while I slept. But now? I'm blogging about them, and I'm still eating my chips and salsa. Yum!

Anyone else out these desensitized? If so, what are you eating as you read this?

Remember folks, when it comes to bed bugs, don't be grossed out. Don't be scared. Don't be paranoid. Just be prepared.

Later.

Time Management!

I just finished my finals for the semester and am looking forward to my fall semester, after which I will have finally earned my undergrad degree. With all the obligations of work, school, a relationship and fighting another bed bug infestation, it hasn’t been easy to allocate adequate time and energy for everything. Keeping one’s home bed bug-free is like a part-time job, if not a full-time one.

I was considering going to graduate school, but began thinking about how much of a hassle college has been so far, especially the aspect of having to be at a certain place at a certain time or it will affect your grades. I’m notoriously tardy for my classes, usually commuting to college straight from my job. My professors make an attempt to sympathize, since it is the City University of New York (CUNY) and many of the students here have to support themselves, and in some cases, their families.

Which comes to the concept of online college, which makes things a lot easier on those of us who have to commit to an hour plus commute to our schools. I know CUNY offers an online undergrad degree, but they are still stuck in the 20th Century when it comes to a Masters degree.

I’m thinking of studying a field that looks good on a resume. Any suggestions?

Gender, Not Race?

In a previous post I theorized that people with fairer skin have more severe reactions to bed bug bites than people with darker skin. I based this theory on the fact that M who has very fair skin has had a far more severe reaction to bed bug bites than I, who is a shade or two darker. I also gave the example of my black neighbor who had his own infestation and had almost no visible sign of any bites, although he did complain about the itching.

In the Comments area for this post, Nobugs suggested that it may very well be gender, and not race or more specifically, one's presence of pigmentation in their skin. It changed my view and made me consider that females may indeed have a more severe reaction to bed bug bites than males.

Interesting--I don't have any data about race, but that's partly because most of the sufferers I know are known to me on the internet so I have no idea of their race :-)

My hunch is that men are less likely to react to bites, or be allergic to bites (and possibly even less likely to be bitten) than women. Of the people who come on Bedbugger, women often say the men they live with aren't bitten. Men are more likely to say they aren't reacting to bites and their female partners/relatives are. -NoBugs

Other posters stepped in to offer their own stories to support Nobugs' theory.

I would agree with Nobugs.

I am darker skinned than my boyfriend. I have visible bites but he doesn't.

I think he's being bitten but isn't reacting. -Anonymous

Could anyone lend any additional personal accounts to support this theory? It sounds far more plausible than the one I supported in my previous post.

White (Wo)Man's Burden?

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while, finals and two days in the hospital will do that to ya...

But I've been itching to address a topic that has been on my mind for a while. It is my belief that white people (or people with fairer skin) have more severe reactions to bed bug bites than people with darker skin. Example?

M is very light-skinned, and almost all of her ancestors came from Europe, causing her to be occasionally mistaken for someone of Northern European descent, even though her mother is Sicilian and her father is Puerto Rican. We had a tiny re-emergence of bed bugs in the last two weeks, and her bites are more profound (redder, more protruding) than mine.

Also, remember the news reports of all those European tourists who stayed at those fancy Manhattan hotels and sued them because they were bitten by bed bugs? I remember seeing that report on Dateline NBC, and the footage of the tourists' white thighs, literally riddled with ugly red bites. I mean, they looked like they had a disease!

I've never had such a bad reaction to bed bug bites. Not as bad as M and defintely not as bad as those European tourists. Like almost all other persons of Puerto Rican heritage, I have black, white and Native American ancestors, which contribute to my light tan complexion. While I have suffered from bed bug bites, the physical reaction my skin gives to the bites have never been as bad as anything I've seen on M's body.

The other example is my neighbor, who is a dark-skinned Jamaican. He had an infestation in his apartment and complained of the constant itching, but the bite marks he's shown me on his arms are almost invisible.

I understand that a few examples do not equal legitimate research. But I wonder if there is a connection between one's level of melanin (skin pigment) in their body and how bad a reaction their skin gives to a bed bug bite. Could melanin cause a person to have an increased indifference or even an imunity to bed bug bites? I think it's a question worth researching.

Later

A Word on Air Mattresses

An anonymous poster recently asked a question about air mattresses and how exactly they help people who are living with bed bugs.

Okay, so just trying to confirm, as I am also living in New York with bedbugs - getting an air mattress will stop it? Like, really?

Trying to figure out what to do...

Air mattresses don’t exactly get rid of bed bugs, but they do make life a bit easier for those trying to get rid of them. In my case, as I had explained in an earlier entry, the bugs had made a comfortable little colony for themselves in my wooden bed base, pillow, mattress and headboard. While I remained in denial for a few months (because I did not want to get rid of the bed) ultimately I had to get rid of the whole damn thing in order to destroy about 90 percent of the bed bugs in my apartment.

Air mattresses are a great solution for people living with bed bugs because the bugs are famous for cutting into conventional mattresses and burrowing themselves into the fabric of the mattress, waiting for you to go to sleep or even lie down. Remember, bed bugs love fabric, paper and wood simply because they make great hiding and nesting places to quietly hide and even launch a small colony. Air mattresses have none of these. Even when you put a fitted sheet over the air mattress, the rubber mattress cannot accommodate bed bugs. The best they can do is crawl onto the blanket, sheet or fitted sheet, but even this environment is not as bed bug-friendly, as the sheet is obviously not as thick or deep as a mattress.

I’ve had a lot of satisfaction with my air mattress. My queen-sized sheets fit perfectly over the bed. They do require some routine maintenance, though. Depending on the temperature of the room, air mattresses will require to be re-inflated twice a week to once every other week. Remember science class? Well, in hot weather air expands, keeping the air mattress firm for much longer than in colder weather, where the air will become thinner, requiring the mattress to be inflated more often.

A word of warning: make sure the air mattress you’re buying comes with an air pump. I made that mistake and discovered there was no way to inflate my new mattress. I had to go back to Target the next day and buy the pump. Make sure the pump you’re buying (usually ranges around $10 to $15) has a power cord and is not the battery-operated kind.

Also I guess you’re probably wondering how to clean an air mattress, like if you spill something on it or if it’s just dirty from constant contact with the floor. Any damp cloth with water or diluted pine will do; it's much easier than cleaning up a spill from a conventional mattress, since the whole thing is made of rubber.

Where to buy air mattresses: I bought my queen-sized mattress for $25 at Target. I trust the Coleman brand simply because they have quality camping products. But other brands are also well made and long-lasting. In February M’s mother threw out her bed bug-ridden mattress and was basically sleeping on a table. I gave her a $10 twin-sized air mattress from Walgreens and it is still in fine condition.

Let’s move to a subject that I’m sure is on the minds of everyone who is considering replacing their bed bug-ridden mattress with an air mattress. Obviously sleeping is not the only thing we do in bed, and I’m sure some of you are afraid your sexual activities just might pop the mattress like a party balloon. I too was concerned about this. My advice would be to check the maximum weight capacity on the air mattress, which should be printed somewhere on the packaging. Simply combine your own weight with the weight of your partner, if you’re single, the average weight of whoever you bring home and add 50 pounds more for all the bouncing up and down that will take place on the mattress. Take that magic number and compare it to the maximum weight capacity listed on the box.

The best time to buy an air mattress is right now as the stores are stocking up their outdoor merchandise. Air beds are widely regarded as camping equipment (so don’t look for them in a furniture store like my dumb ass did!), and since summer is coming many stores will be stocking up on these beds and probably have them on sale. Some are affordable, others are expensive. Some are self-inflating with the air pumps built into the bed; some have three-foot high frames to give the illusion of a traditional bed. In short, there are many different kinds of air beds to choose from, so use the Internet to shop around for one that suits your tastes.

Well, I can’t think of any more tips to offer on buying a mattress, but if you can come up with some questions, I’d be happy to answer them.

My Bad!

I know I failed to post on Saturday, like I said I would every Saturday from now on.

How about every other Saturday? I got one coming up for April 21, I promise.

Later!

Saturday Night's All Right (For Blogging)

Just popped in to announce that since I've decided to commit to adding a new entry every Saturday for my other blog, it's only right I do the same for Bugged Out. I've been a professional writer for several years, so the notion of sticking to deadlines is nothing new to me. It's simply a matter of making my own and sticking to it.

Later.