Rode my bike to work today. And it rained. C’est la vie!
It’s only Wednesday and I think I’ve done at least 10 loads of laundry this week. Damn bugs.
My morning routine involves letting the ferrets out to play while I sit and watch them. This is a very calming routine for me and even though it involves cleaning up after them when they get put away, making this time for them and myself in the morning really helps to set the tone for my day. If I don’t get it, usually because I’ve gotten up late, then my day tends to start out with me feeling rushed and hectic. I’m grateful for the days I allow myself this form of calming meditation.
I picked up a package today from the post office. I like the packages I get from India. Covered in cloth, seams are stitched and sealed with wax, reminiscent of a time long past. Plus, shiny things are found inside!
I was pretty tired today. Yesterday wore me out mentally and physically. Spending a quiet evening at home. Treated myself and Michael with dinner from Zorba on the Run from the downtown market.
To be from now and forward referred to as “Bugs and Daffy Day” since that sounds a lot better than the “Day of the Bed Bug Infestation From Hell.”
Yes, you read that right, we figured out that our little “Hister beetles” were actually bed bugs!
Ugh.
Ack!
Gross!!!!
So how does that happen? We have no idea how these creatures got into our home. We’ve been in our home just over five years. We have had as many brand new beds too. Each one had different issues or larger problems with a lump in the middle, so we weren’t terribly tied to any one of them. The one we had (notice the _had_ part) we’ve had for over a year now and I figured we would be replacing the one we’ve been on in the next six months to a year. That would happen a lot faster than I could have imagined.
We’ve both been reacting to something for about a month and had what we thought was a simple rash: arms, wrists, a bit of Michael’s belly, each constantly itching with red spots in a diffuse pattern. I’ve tried to analyze our diet and our environment and could not nail it down since nothing really changed in our physical environment in the past month. We have lost two pets very unexpectedly, so I was wondering if maybe it was just stress manifesting itself. I wish that had been the problem!
I’m not going to go into the gory details of the cleanup, but over the nine hour day it entailed throwing out our box springs, sheets and mattress pad, plus putting anything and everything that was not in a drawer (e.g. the clothes that had been all over the floor, clean and dirty alike) back into the laundry to be washed on hot. There was massive amounts of vacuuming, lots of stuff thrown in the garbage, a trip to many stores to get zippered mattress cover, new pillows plus zipper covers for them, bug spray and one of the three bags of diatomacious earth left in Fairbanks.
I have no idea how we got them. But they will not be coming back!
In retrospect, I should have been more pleased on Saturday morning when Michael asked me if I remember him waking in the middle of the night and turning the light on. He said he felt something on him and found a “little beetle” on his arm, that he had a good look and then squished and put in the trash. So when he announced that he had found online that it was likely a “Hister beetle”, I really should have been more pleased. These are harmless little beetles that are known to cause an allergic reaction when people come into contact with them, much like “no see ems” would, explain the minor rashes he and I have had on our arms and wrists.
I should have been more happy because Sunday would bring us into a new world of hell. Look to the next day’s entry for that world of misery.
On a more positive note I did manage to clean up much of my dance room. I may not be able to do much yoga yet, but I wanted it clean and ready to go once my ankle was feeling better. I got all the miscellaneous junk off the floor FINALLY. It was almost all sorted into proper bins and totes or in the give away pile. I have one bin left of random stuff left to sort, then I need to rearrange my vanity/makeup area. But the floor is clean!
Staying inside and off my feet due to an injury and I’m trying to make the most of this “downtime” so I’ve been doing some very much needed file management on my home laptop and desktop machines, plus I”ve taken the past 24 hours or so to move the majority of my performance videos from my personal youtube channel that no one visits, to the Space for Movement Project channel.
I made pretty good progress locating original versions of many of the more recent performances dating back to 2012, updating them to include caption for date, event and music, but the original file from the 2011 Dead Writers video is eluding me!
Still bored of physical limitations, but I was productive otherwise.
Nothing much to say. It was a day at work, then an evening at home. Bored with my physical limitations. Grumpy about it even.
Ankle is still swollen and painful to walk on. I’m finally off of dance for a while and planned to do all sort of of walking or biking to work, but I can barely hobble gracefully to the car right now. We also have a three-day holiday weekend coming up and I’m wondering what I’ve done to cause this feeling like I’m in a deluge of bad luck and misfortune.
In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t say “what else” because the upcoming weekend would show me just how more bad it could get.
Cute shoes yesterday, even though they were flats, mean a painful case of Achilles tendinitis today, at least that is what the P.A. told me today at my appointment. Back to my wearing Keens with my skirts and dresses! I’m sure that’s considered high fashion for Fairbanks.
This means no physical yoga for me, although that does not mean I’m ignoring my sadhana; instead I feel like I’ve been doing an awful lot of personal reflection lately, even for me. I haven’t made any grand decisions around these reflections, I’m just watching them as a patient observer.
Only cried once today, but it was a full on sobbing attack. I miss my Missy girl. I keep seeing Shadow enter a room out of the corner of my eye and think it’s her, then I remember she is gone.
