Bed Bugs

The New Yorker has an interesting, short article about the bedbug explosion in New York City. While reading it this morning, I was reminded of when I was a teenager, living in my half-underground room at my parents' house on the edge of the woods. You see, every spring, I'd be inundated with bites - little red, hard bites that didn't go away for weeks and weeks. Eventually, I figured out that they were baby spider bites. Thoroughly freaked out, I took to cleaning the inside edges of my waterbed and even underneath the water mattress, the corners of the room, the corners on the floor in the closet - everywhere a spider egg sac might hide (what I couldn't do was clean inside the cinder blocks that made up the walls - I was pretty sure that was the source of my problem). The pinnacle of this little war came when one night when, after a meal of scrambled eggs and M&Ms (I was a 6'2" teenager who exercised 3-4 hours a day - I ate what was available), I took Raid foaming spray to all the nooks and crannies in my room and, rather than succumbing to common sense, immediately went to sleep in the same room. About 2:00 a.m. I woke up not with spider bites, but with a chemically induced fever and nausea so bad I filled up both sides of the kitchen sink with the above meal. After that attempt to kill me, we got along a little better - I only sprayed them when I wasn't there, they only bit me now and then.