nathan is here, we discover the downside to this apartment

we have a great apartment.

both Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are 5 blocks away from us. practically our backyard. there is a 24 hour deli right beneath our building. there's an elevator! there's a bagel place right down the street, all kinds of restaurants and bars, a bookstore, and the subway stop is a 4/5 express stop. we have hardwood floors, good water pressure, and high ceilings. it's pre-furnished, like i said last time, with two dressers, the flat-screen plasma television, a dvd player, a sound system, etc. new microwave. two-person dining table. and, up until this morning, bed bugs. bed bugs! BED BUGS.
i was told by Landlord (after i had already sent him 3 months of rent, of course) that the nutbag, lunatic crazy woman who had sublet'd before us and whose myriad belongings are still crapping up our dresser and closet (but that's another, less interesting difficulty of my Move To NYC. basically she is an incompetent nutcase, and she still has keys to our apartment. nngh), was the cause of a bed bug infestation 2 months ago. but, don't worry! there are no more bugs left! why, of course he had fumigated the apartment 3 times and replaced the mattress, and there was no problem because THEY WERE ALL GONE. i fretted, but i believed him.

YEAH RIGHT, LANDLORD.

Nathan and i returned from an IKEA shopping spree yesterday afternoon, half-exhausted but gleeful, only to discover a bug. a bug! just one, and it was tiny, a very tiny nymph, creeping obliviously over the old beat up leather of the couch. under normal circumstances this wouldn't freak me out, because under normal circumstances i really like bugs. it's just when they congregate and breed and become several thousand bugs that i become fully repulsed and horrified. since i had had my doubts about bed bugs in the first place, this situation required further investigation. and further investigation led us to this horrible discovery:

UM, EW.

they like to hide, even in bad-quality phone pictures, so i circled them in red to aid in vicarious revulsion.

the couch was thrown out (Nathan and i hired two hispanic guys off the street to help us move it, since in every case involving an infestation of my stuff by some kind of creepy-crawly, i suffer from terrible visceral convulsions and can only help by sobbing and waving my arms frantically in circles), and in a whirl of irrational and deranged adrenaline, i sprayed down the whole apartment floor with the first thing i could find, which happened to be a bottle of Febreeze. because bed bugs hate the smell of clean linen! YEAH, TAKE THAT YOU NINETEENTH CENTURY PARASITIC PLAGUE. DON'T EVEN THINK TO FEED OFF OF MY BLOOD OR YOU'LL GET ANOTHER FACE OF LAUNDRY-SCENTED DEATH. then this morning Exterminator came to take care of any of the icky stragglers that hadn't drowned in my frantic febreeze flailing. i hope they're dead.

Landlord told us to go back to IKEA and pick out any futon we wanted, on his dime. so we've solved sleeping arrangement problems, in case anyone wants to visit us. unfortunately, though, bed bugs are like a disease for houses, and they're contagious. i really wouldn't recommend anyone visiting us until after we are certain they're dead and gone.

luckily (for me, not Nathan), i'm spending the week in Bayside taking care of my grandmother. emptying her catheter bag every 4 hours, as it turns out, is infinitely preferable to bed bugs.