Fleas, not bedbugs.

So, I have been realizing more and more that the bites that I was getting that began this summer probably weren't bedbugs, but were rather fleas (perhaps via a cat that the former upstairs neighbors secretly had before they moved out, the fleas being transferred via the laundry room or when I did a walk-around in their apartment just to see the space, before they moved out).

For one, the bites didn't swell like bedbug bites, and they were towards my legs, and not up towards my buttocks and back and all of the large warm muscles that bedbugs prefer.

For another, whatever it was came back after the cycle for bedbugs should have been broken -- it's usually two months for bedbugs -- and it was beyond that when whatever this was reappeared, and that would have been in the timeframe for a delayed hatch for flea eggs.

Really, it's just very annoying... I have next to no fibers in my apartment, but eggs can lay dormant for a very long time, and you just have to catch the newly hatched eggs or the adults and kill them every time right away, until over time all the eggs are hatched and everything is gone and there's nothing left to lay any new ones.

Right now my strategy is not to worry, and if I get a bite -- something that happens every six to ten weeks -- at that point I do my laundry intensively, spray down my bed and much of my apartment with rubbing alcohol, and lay out diatomaceous earth everywhere, to kill those active adults, which (it seems) usually happens right away, since no bites recur right then like if adults were around and feeding.

At some point if I keep doing that, I'll have worn them down, and they'll be gone and it all will stop.

What a pain.

Some occurrences from several months ago:

1) At the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (newer) (female) (Guatemalan) coworker pulls something out of her pocket, and gives me a (round) (gold) coin from (Guatemala), as a gift for me to have. 

2) Later, at a very rare weekday lunch-shift because I just don't work those anymore, I see a(n older) (nerdy) (white) man and his (older) (Asian) wife who are regular lunch customers -- pad thai chicken and beef noodle soup, usually! -- and we haven't seen each other since right before I headed out of town to the city that I used to live in to go see a concert and that was almost a year ago, now, and we talk some, including about my changing shifts because there's new staff with different schedule demands that displaced me from what I used to work, and also about child-appropriate music and role models with pop and rock (like, they don't let their [middle school-age] daughter listen to a lot of music where the singer has highly questionable content and behavior, children are just too suggestible at that age, and I have to agree with them, that that's a good decision).

3) My shit one morning was just one of the widest shits that I simply have ever seen in my life, it was like round and curvy and also just incredibly incredibly wide, like so wide it's amazing that something like that could even come out of your asshole unhindered (perhaps this was related to all the fiber from sweet potato soup that I was eating at the time, and like maybe that gave the shit a certain amount of "give" coming out that got it out of my asshole, but it also kept it together as one piece with a rough shape and let it re-expand and sprawl out a bit, once it came out of my bowels and sat there some in the toilet?).

Computer scare:

One day out of nowhere when I was sitting at my kitchen table in my little cottage, the screen on my laptop suddenly went black, and when I did word-processing, every time that you tapped down, there was like this pause of pixels and no gentle scrolling, and it was just freaky and jenky beyond belief.

Immediately, I got frightened that my computer was breaking down, and I'd maybe lose a recent version of a doc or some recent downloads, and that I'd have to go through the whole rigamarole of buying a computer again, and besides that, Word now has (I think) this price-gouging monthly subscription model that they lock you into, you can't just get it once-and-for-all anymore like you used to, and stuff like that is just very unpleasant to deal with, in life.

Thankfully, though, I saved some files on my thumbdrive and emailed them to myself, and I also was googling on my phone, and it all seemed to *maybe* have been a temporary graphics file overload that was doing that, it probably was nothing fatal with the motherboard or the screen wiring or anything like that.

Phew.

(I think.)

Addendum.

After I had written that last blogpost, I was talking with the one (older) (townie) bartender at the local brewery, and I was saying how this winter is just beating me up, and she said that she's been hearing that from a lot of people, and then we were talking about the dryness in the air, and she said she had pulled out her humidifier and put it in her bedroom to run, and then I mentioned how I was boiling water on the stove, and how for the first time ever in my life, I was keeping a water bottle by the side of my bed, to sip when I woke up with my nose and throat all dried out, and it turns out that she's been waking up the same way and so she's been doing that same thing, too, for the very first time ever in her life, and she's lived here all these years!

Weird.

Another sign of an incredibly dry winter:

For like a week or so like 2 or 3 months ago, my lips were just incredibly dry all the time, to the point where I had to put Vaseline on them at night to make them feel tolerable, which is something that I just never have to do.

Like, what gives with the lack of humidity in my cottage or out-and-about in the world, this winter?

At one point, too, I had bit the inside of my cheek, and my lip was cracked a little bit, and it just made me feel so wrecked, for a hot second.

Another sign of aging parents:

My mom tells me on the phone that she's sending me an article about a local state archaeological dig near them that my dad thought that I might be interested in, and like a week later, an envelope from them with the cut-out newspaper article arrives.

Then, like a week after that, an envelope from them with a photocopy of that same article arrives.

. . .

(??? - maybe they copied the article and couldn't find it, and so they sent the clipping, only to find the photocopy later and then forget that they had already sent the clipping?)

My new workplace habit...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, whenever an app delivery driver comes in and stands there speaking obnoxiously loud on speakerphone, or has some video playing at excessively high volume:

I use the app's "review" option for the delivery person, punch in something like "needs improvement" with "professionalism," and then explain whatever their behavior was.

(And it turns out that my one [chubby] [Thai] coworker has been doing this for a while over different stuff, I just never had realized before, that this was something that we could do!)

They can be standing like ten feet away from dine-in customers talking so loudly at high levels -- sometimes with profanity, if they're talking in (English)! -- and it just brings down the atmosphere in the restaurant, with the customers who you expect tips from being right there for all of it.

I feel slightly bad doing that since these are pretty vulnerable people pretty far down on the economic ladder, but some of them also look slightly off or even crazy and you never know who has guns or can get violent nowadays, so you're just better to resolve this through the app reporting system, especially since you don't want that behavior in your restaurant, killing the atmosphere and bringing down the tips.

You almost wonder, too, if it's behavior like that that's keeping the app delivery drivers from getting real jobs, somewhere.

To self-justify, perhaps them getting that behavior flagged might help them, in the long-run.