I just thought I’d post a little update saying I’m doing pretty well at the moment. Today I got a new (to me) car. It’s a Buick Park Avenue, basically a slightly fancier version of the Buick LeSabre I totaled in December. Though 24 years old it still drives fine. I have a brother who is a car mechanic and he was the one who recommended the car to me. It’s very convenient to have a mechanic in the family.

The last few days I’ve been prepping the house for an exterminator to come on Monday. For the better part of a year we’ve been battling bedbugs. We did everything the internet said, spread diatomaceous earth, replaced our sofas and armchair, threw out the headboard of our bed, etc., but they kept coming back. What bothered me the most was not the bites but the waste they leave on our bedding, waste that leaves stains that can’t be washed out. Finally we gave up and have summoned professional help. I can’t wait till the little bastards are all gone. Once I’m confident the house is no longer infested, I’m going to replace all the sheets and pillowcases with new ones that don’t have dark spots all over them.

It is a bit of a production, getting the house prepped for this. You have to empty your closets and dressers and nightstands etc and wash all your clothes and things in 120-degree water and put them in plastic bags, knotted. I have gone and put the clothes I can’t wash (wool, silk etc) in the freezer with hopes that if they are infested, that’ll take care of it. They will come to my house, put poison everywhere, then come back in a few weeks and do the same thing again to take care of any bugs that survive the first round. I’m taking the opportunity, in prepping the house, to also de-clutter stuff. I have way too many clothes. Fortunately the exterminator told me my books could stay on the bookshelves; otherwise I don’t know what I would have done with them.

You can’t be in the house or have any pets there during the treatment, so I’ve arranged to put Patrick in doggy day care on Monday and I’m going to take the cats and go visit my mother while the exterminators are doing their thing. Patrick has never attended this doggy day care before so they want him come over to the place tomorrow to do a “temperament test” to make sure he gets along with the other dogs. Patrick loves playing with other dogs so I expect he’ll pass with flying colors.

In April, Michael and I will be going to Wisconsin to the missing persons event that I attend annually. Readers might recall that we tried to go last year, only to have our vehicle’s transmission give out on the way up, which sucked. This year if I get permission I might borrow my dad’s car, switch ours out for his, for the trip. Dad’s car is newer, and therefore less likely to die on us. Also it almost certainly gets better gas mileage and gas prices are through the roof right now. I really look forward to these events cause I get to interact with others who share my interest in missing persons.

All the news is terrible but I’m trying to keep my chin up and do my website work and read books rather than doomscroll. I read a fascinating memoir by a lady who, as a student in New York City in the 1960s, met and married an Afghan man and followed him back to Afghanistan when his visa expired, which of course turned out to be a massive mistake. She had no idea what Afghanistan was like and her husband did not tell her beforehand. On top of it being, well, Afghanistan, her in-laws whom she had to live with were not very welcoming. This woman is reasonably sure her mother-in-law was trying to kill her. The MIL was not happy that her son had married outside his culture and his faith. The author got umpteen bouts of dysentery before she found out her MIL had instructed the servants to stop boiling her drinking water and stop washing her produce in boiled water. Her MIL had to have known what the result of that would be; she was basically poisoning this poor woman. What saved her was getting hepatitis, which nearly killed her, but which gave her an excuse to leave Afghanistan and return to the US “temporarily, for medical treatment”. She had the good sense not to come back.

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