Note to self: no worries - it's all part of Our Arabian Adventure

Last night was one of those times when I have to swallow hard and tell myself that, no, not everything is going to be funny or happy or the way I want.  This is an ADVENTURE.  Do I think Aladdin thought it was great when he got thrown over the cliff into the ocean, or when Jafar sent him to the ends of the earth?  No.  Same thing here.  Some things just stink. 

So we've been here for six weeks now, and just about the whole time, Mike and I have been noticing that we get these itchy red bites.  I kept looking at the dog for fleas, but none were to be found.  Mike's mom warned us that we needed to keep the pets on anti-flea meds because they'll get fleas in a second here in the sandy desert.  So that's what we've been doing, but we still have these funky flea-like bites on us.  They are really itchy, but it's only one or two at a time.  Then we'll get some new ones.  I had chalked it up to biting flies or no-see-ums, since we keep the sliding glass door open a lot, and we do get a lot of flies in the house.  Then the other day, I noticed this teeny weeny spider-looking thing on the bed, so I figured that we were getting spider bites.  Mike did have two in a row that really looked like spider bites.  (Those of you who are familiar with my aversion to spiders will be happy to know that this one was so small that it didn't bother me too much.  It was the size of a couple of grains of salt.)  Then last night, I had a brainstorm.  It hit me all at once, and it was almost immediately confirmed.  That spider I saw the other day wasn't a spider at all...it was a BED BUG.  Oh my God, we've got BED BUGS!!  We've had bed bugs for SIX WEEKS!!  At 10:00 at night we stripped down the bed and looked at our standard Aramco-issue double bed mattress and box-spring.  UGH!!!  HUGE yucky bedbugs!  There were not very many, but they were bigger - the size of a fly or so - and when they squished them, yup, they were filled with blood.  OUR blood.  YUCK!!!  There are not enough exclamation points to adequately express my disgust!

Of course, we discovered this at 10:00 at night, which meant 2 things:  1) we were going to be up really late doing laundry, and 2) there was not much to be done about it until the morning, which means we have to sleep on the bed-bug-bed again!  Agh!  So we did the laundry and got online to see if there are any home remedies.  One of the things we found is that you can point a hairdryer into your mattress for several hours to make it so hot that the bedbugs die.  So that's what we did.  We ran the hairdryer into the mattress for about 2.5 hours, which made the mattress really hot and the room really hot too.  It made me feel a little better.  But we still had to sleep on the bed bugs, so last night was a really long night.  I kept waking up thinking there were creepy-crawlies on me. 

This morning, I called first thing to report it and get a new mattress delivered.  Want to guess what the lady said in her nearly unintelligible broken English? 
me:  "I need to get a replacement mattress and box springs for our house because the one you gave us has bed bugs."
her:  "hmmm.  We can bring you one tomorrow at 1:00."

WHAT??  "Hmmm"????  Where is the shock and revulsion, the apologetic tone?  Is this a common complaint?  Do all of the mattresses have bed bugs?  I'm sure they don't isolate the mattresses from one another in the warehouse...will we just be swapping one mattress with bed bugs for another one with bed bugs?  And TOMORROW??  NO!  TODAY!!  That demand didn't fly, so yes, we will be sleeping on the bed-bug-bed again tonight.  It's so much grosser now that I know about the problem. 

So today I am spending winning two-year-old testing battles with Lawrence (I am on the 54th time of getting up and emotionlessly putting him back in his bed for nap.  Yes, I counted.  It's not quite a minute per trip, so it's been almost an hour of him getting up and getting put right back in.  It has taken a long time to write this.) and doing ALL the laundry in the WHOLE house.  I'm not sure how smart this is, because Aramco might just be bringing more bed bugs into my house tomorrow, but it makes me feel better. 

I have tried really hard not to vent in this blog.  There are lots of crummy things that have happened to us so far, but I've tried to see the funny parts and chalk it up at Our Arabian Adventure.  This is actually pretty par-for-the-course, but for some reason it really gets under my skin.  Pun intended.  Arabs don't have the best personal hygiene anyway...what was I expecting?  Ah well, I guess part of the adventure is that we'll have stories to tell.  Let this be one of them.