Digital Alterity

So much has happened in the past couple of days that is so wildly disparate that it feels like it must have taken a week to live through. I really have to discuss everything separately to make any sense at all of it, and this has quickly ballooned into something just too plain swollen and epic to be contained in a ChangeLog entry.

Episode 2: Revenge of the Arthropods

As Allyson mentioned, after a week or so of getting random bites, I actually found a bedbug late on Wednesday night. Now you must understand that this is strange in and of itself. Bedbugs have evolved into little insect ninjas honestly. They can detect sleeping humans and will only come out in the cover of darkness if their target is safely asleep. Even given this strange early-riser bedbug, it’s pretty close to a miracle that I actually saw him. You see, even though I had only had four hours of sleep the night before (after being so excited about my new phone that I couldn’t properly sleep), I wanted to stay up to play Scrabble with Allyson. We retired to our room at nearly one in the morning and just kind of hung out up there with the lights on unwinding from the day. From the other room, Tux was whining about something, and I sat up to try to see what he was whining about. While sitting up, I saw it walking along the edge of the bed. I kept it corralled while Allyson went to grab me a baggie to seal it in so that we’d have evidence to show when we talked to the apartment folks the next morning.

After catching the bug, we each had our respective emotional outbursts. I went into full on hysterics, and Allyson got pretty angry. Allyson went downstairs to be alone, and I went to my computer to cry, pray, and email my family to ask for more prayer. Then I sat down to knit a few rows on my nascent ribbed scarf to try to center myself a bit. After we both calmed down a notch, Allyson suggested that we clean the house and get things ready for the exterminator to spray. This made more sense than anything I could thing of, and we began the bedbug culling sequel. When we initially had the bugs, we threw out tons of stuff. This time we even more aggressively threw out stuff. Random furniture has been eliminated just so that we didn’t have to move as much stuff. We still intend to get rid of our couch and several crappy bookcases as well. We finally retired at about 4:30 in the morning.

We were expecting the usual resistance up in the front office. In any conversation, the girl usually up there will start out extremely confrontational. You nearly always have to wear her down from “absolute bitch” to “normal human being”. I got up around 8:30 and started responding to my sister who was kind enough to respond to my frantic email from the night before. While typing, I heard a familiar sound. The exterminator was making the rounds on his monthly visit. In sheer joy, I woke up Allyson to tell her and then suddenly he made it to our apartment and knocked on the door. I invited him in, showed him what I found, and asked him what we should do. He said that he could be ready to go in an hour, and I told him that’s all we needed. We sprung into action and managed to completely prep our house for spraying in about an hour. We moved all of the furniture. We took as much stuff as humanly possible off of the carpets for a good residual effect on as much surface area as could be managed. When our pest control friend came back, we put Tux in his cat crate and 802.11b in her rodent travel cage and we left.

We passed the first part of the day out at McAllister’s Deli. We had a delightful leisurely lunch there on the breeze way with our zoo of animals. We ended up sitting out there from eleven until about one. Eventually, we decided to stop by Michael’s so that Allyson could shop for some yarn and needles while Tux, b, and I sat in the air-conditioned car. Making our way over to the little strip mall where Panera and Starbucks resided, we resolved to sit outside and pass the rest of the time until we could get back into our toxic apartment. After a cookie and a drink, the knitting started up again. I spent nearly the whole day knitting on my scarf, you see, and it shows. There has been a ton of progress thus far. I’m extremely proud and think I might give it to my Granny Richey when it’s all said and done. Tux was extremely well-behaved during all the parts of the day when we were outside of a restaurant. I think he rather enjoyed being able to look at the birds and smell the plant smells. The only time he fussed was when he was in the car.

Last night, I slept like a baby after getting enough stuff moved back to be able to setup our airbed. No bugs could traverse the toxic floor, and there was no reason I shouldn’t sleep. Eight hours later, I’m awake and typing about it all.

The Sirloin of Love

All of this occurred on my third wedding anniversary. At about 5:30 yesterday evening, we ignored everything bedbug-related and went on our anniversary date at the Stonewood Grill and Travern. Given the fact that it was only open for dinner, it seemed like a likely candidate for a nice romantic dinner. We both cleaned up(1) for dinner, and I even donned a pair of khaki pants and a polo shirt(2).

Stonewood is absolutely amazing. Allyson and I both got steak—she the sirloin and I the New York Strip—and I can honestly say that it was possibly the best damn steak I had ever had in my life. It was amazing. The sirloin was so good that it worked like some sort of mega aphrodisiac, and Allyson looked several times during the meal as if she were going to leap upon me suddenly to satisfy the carnal desires awakened by the wonderful corn-fed aged beef.

My Precious

The observant among you have already caught on to my mention of the new phone. I did indeed get the new Motorola V710, and it is just plain awesome. After getting the correct cable, it syncd up with iSync like an absolute charm, importing all the numbers in my OS X Address Book and all the items in my iCal calendars in a matter of about a minute or two. The phone works just fine with Verizon’s National Access over the USB connection, giving me an Internet connection anywhere that my cell phone can dial out. The voice recognition features are wonderful. With absolutely no training, the phone allows me to say the name of anyone in my contacts and prompts me to choose any of their numbers. It also allows me to dial numbers without even touching the keypad. The speaker phone is better than most of the speaker phones we have in my office building. The camera is pretty decent, but I have a hard time getting excited about the camera on a mobile phone. It is an absolutely amazing phone, and you can expect an article about it when I actually get to test the Bluetooth features once my Powerbook gets back from the shop. I know that some features are crippled right now, but I don’t know the extent yet.

The best part? Verizon allowed me to renegotiate my contract for an early upgrade. We signed up for another two-year contract (essentially adding one year to our previous agreement) and got the phone at the severely discounted contract-subsidized price. Because of this, Allyson also got to upgrade her phone, and she chose the LG VX4500. Both of us have leapt far beyond our pitiful Kyocera 2325 Fisher Price phones, and I’m now completely satisfied with my mobile phone situation.

The End?

My week-long vacation still continues! In today’s episode, God sends a hurricane to drench the entire state of Florida while I scramble to the local yarn store. For provisions, of course. I wonder how nutritious wool and cotton can be in a pinch…

Footnotes

1. As an aside, I can’t help but wonder whether other married folks shower together as often as Allyson and I do. I’m not really talking about anything hanky-panky-related either. Allyson and I shower together several times per week. Our hot water heater is such that if we don’t both take our shower simultaneously there probably won’t be enough to keep the person getting hygienic sloppy seconds warm for more than two minutes.
2. …and my new Chucks. You can generally convince a punk rock type to put on nice clothes, but you really have to watch what he’ll inadvertently put on his feet.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 13th, 2004 at 9:38:08 and is filed under Bedbugs, Personal, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.