Now, mind you, I still don’t think we actually have any, but I’m still not ready to take chances. If you’re just joining us, I spent an hour or so in a motel room in Salina, KS, that—as it turned out—had a bedbug problem. It must have been a new infestation, not established, because I examined the seams of the mattress and they were pristine. My knitting bag sat on the bed for about half an hour, and my cosmetics bag (an overnight bag) sat on the luggage rack (also a bad place to put stuff, since if a previous guest brought some bugs in on their luggage, that’s where they’ll be). I sent the knitting bag and all its contents through the clothes dryer at my in-laws house. (20–30 minutes in a hot dryer will kill bed bugs.)

BTW, this is what came out of the dryer.

And that’s after I extracted my pajamas and a little drawstring knitting bag. That mess took hours to untangle! (There’s also a funny story about it, which I’ll share another time. Help me remember.)

I knew it was going to come out like that. One giant skein of yarn, one partial normal-sized skein. But what are you gonna do?

As for the cosmetics bag, Rich and I sat out in the cold at his parents’ house and emptied it, examining each item and putting it in a plastic bag. (An ironic note: I had decided before I left that I would go through everything in the bag after I got back from this trip and see what I really didn’t need to tote around.) Any items that I didn’t trust stayed inside the bag, and I then put the whole kit & kaboodle inside a kitchen trash bag, sealing it tightly. We transported it home that way.

Today I finally did something with it. I tried to put it through a cycle of the dryer, with it resting on the “tennis shoe” rack that hooks on the door. Nothing doing—some part of it kept catching on the drum as it turned, flinging it around wildly and wedging it in various tight spaces so that I had trouble opening the door. So, going back to square one, I just took the temperature in our little chest freezer. As long as the temperature is below 0°F, you can freeze bed bugs. You just have to keep them that cold for…wait for it…four days!

The irony of this is that if it were summertime, in our climate, we would have no trouble at all getting the bag (and any living occupants) to a high enough temp to kill them. All you have to do is seal it in a black garbage bag and hang it someplace where the sun will shine on it. (If you’ve ever gotten into a car that’s been parked in the sun on a 100° day, you’ll be able to vouch for how effective this would be.) A couple of hours is all it takes.

But it’s winter. So here’s what I’m doing:

Beside the Costco pack of bread and the homemade bulk meatballs, next to the limeade and grass-fed sirloin — my overnight bag.

Oy.