The attic

The attic in my house is a dark, frightening, uninhabitable place that gets so hot in the summer that you can't be up there for more than 5 minutes at a time. In fact, I hadn't been up since we moved back. My excuse was the heat, but in reality, I was afraid of what I might find. 

The previous tenants,  as mentioned earlier, were less than tidy, and I didn't want to wander up there and find a depressing impenetrable mountain of discarded things. By things, I mean any object I didn't want for myself. I like treasure, but I was certain these slovenly renters had left none for their evil landlord.

There was also the bug issue. I knew cockroaches lay their eggs in attics because attics are relatively warm and see little human traffic. My wife and I were also hearing noises up there in the wee hours. We almost called the Ghost Hunters. Well, not really, but the scratching we were hearing was a little unsettling. I had to get up there, and take care of business before the problem got any worse. I climbed the rickety ladder one brisk September morning, and this is what I found:

"There's some in  here! Occupied!"

That's  right; a raccoon was living in our attic. I'd heard stories about rabies and other infectious diseases being spread by these sometimes irritable vagrants, and I was not going to be a part of it. So, I decided to leave the raccoon removal up to a pest control professional. 

I tell you how that went down in my next post.

Ohio has a lot of bed bugs

Have you ever woken up in a cold sweat as the last vestiges of some horrible dream faded from your memory. Maybe you were being chased in that dream. Maybe you were being eaten. I have a greater fear of the latter. This fear seemed all the more probable after hearing my friend's story about her ordeal with bedbugs. 

She'd just come back from a trip to Ohio for a conference. She stayed in a nice hotel that we will call Chilten for obvious reasons. She came back with bed bugs. I was not surprised to find out her little friends climbed aboard in Ohio after reading this wiki how article: How to Get Rid of Bed Bugs. I thought it would provide her with some tips on her new found parasitic house guests, but it was actually just a breakdown of the cities with the biggest bed bug problems. 

Ohio showed up a lot. What is it about Ohio I wonder? New York, Chicago, Baltimore? Sure. But Dayton? Maybe they're not as up to speed on pest control there, maybe the little critters have a thing for Midwestern blood. I can't say, but the topic intrigues me.

Looks nice enough to me