We're Certifiable. We admit it.

M and I are crazy. Totally nuts. Definitely neurotic. We once cleaned our entire house with bleach because we'd been caring for a dog with Parvo and we were afraid that if we didn't clean the carpets, dishes, furniture, towels, linens, walls and picture frames with bleach, that any other dog who ever came into our home would contract the virus as well. Parvo is a terrifying virus, but the dishes? We did not need to bathe our dishes in bleach. We did it anyway. 

Today, a neighbor knocked on my door to ask me if I had bed bugs, because she has an infestation. She's wrong, I thought to myself. She can't possibly have bed bugs because bed bugs don't exist in the U.S. anymore. To prove it, she showed me a dead bug she was keeping in a plastic baggie. I still didn't believe her, so I went online and found an image of a bed bug. Her little dead friend in the sandwich bag? Definitely a bed bug. So, thank you Google, I started researching bed bugs. And then I completely lost my mind. When I told M what I had found out, he also lost his mind. 

Two neurotic, crazy people should not be allowed to share living space.

We decided that the best way to combat the bed bugs, which we didn't even have yet, was to take apart our bed frame and caulk every single crack and crevice so the little shits would have no where to hide. We caulked around the bed frame, underneath it, and then we caulked the cracks in the floors and the baseboards and the door jambs and around our windows. But that wasn't enough. After I saw photos of bed bugs hiding in exposed screw heads, we had to spackle over every exposed screw head in every piece of furniture, cabinetry, appliance, you name it. This took us two days. And we still didn't feel safe. So we bought that magical expanding foam stuff and used it to fill in the holes in the walls (why are there holes in the walls, you ask? Because our landlord is really a slumlord), the holes in the baseboards and the gaps around the various heating pipes throughout the apartment. Then we stuffed our box spring and our mattress into hypoallergenic airtight vinyl mattress covers. As a final measure of precaution, M sprinkled Borax powder around the perimeter of the apartment and behind all of the furniture, then he used one kind of bed bug-killing-spray all around the perimeter of the apartment, behind all the furniture, in all the cabinets and closets and yet a THIRD deadly bug spray was set off in our apartment to fill the air and kill anything that might be lurking.

That was three days ago. It is now 3:21 a.m. and I cannot sleep because I read that bed bugs particularly like to come out between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. The vinyl mattress cover is making me sweat like a dirty little monkey and I just found this article on bed bugs in hotel rooms, so pretty much, I will never be able to travel again.

THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN IN LOS ANGELES.