This time it's for real

Yesterday and today, I eviscerated my bedroom. Everything must go. I put more loads of junk in the oven than I can even count; I laundered the last of my clothing. Towards the end of the day, running out of things I can safely bake, I decided to make some room in the freezer and take my first load of freezer-treated possessions out to the car where I'm keeping all the other treated possessions that are too pointy to store in garbage bags.

When I opened the freezer door, 10 days since I had placed my most recent load inside, the first thing I noticed was the multitude of dead insects arrayed near the door. Most of them were clearly fruit flies, all wings and legs, but some of them had the distinctive teardrop shape of bedbugs.

Bedbug. Teardrop shape and dark posterior.
No, this isn't one of the ones I found.
I really don't feel like getting close to them.

My stomach dropped. I grabbed my tweezers and with shaking hands, I managed to collect the three bedbug-shaped corpses (after crunching off most of their legs and crushing one of them entirely). They had long antennae and that characteristic darker posterior that screams "bedbugs." I about screamed myself.

Well, they are safely in a plastic bag now. Without their legs, I doubt that even if they revive, they'll be escaping anywhere, but I am totally freaked out anew!

These three bedbugs are the first hard evidence I've seen of them living in my house. After all my flashlit inspections, all my cleaning, all my scrubbing and vacuuming and high-temp washing and baking, I still hadn't seen one bug, nymph, egg, or even fecal stain. Yet these dudes prove that there are probably others. And if the others haven't been creeping out of their hiding places to die when I cooked them, then maybe they're still alive!

My car is probably now swarming with living bedbugs! I'm doomed.

The only stuff that I had in the freezer were the art supplies that I'd stored under my bed and the cardboard box of CD's I'd stored in my closet. So did they come from the closet or under the bed? Curse me for not trying harder to isolate the sources! If they were under the bed, I might still be OK, because almost everything that was formerly stored under the bed was in cardboard boxes that I subsequently threw away.

But then there were all the sewing supplies in the giant sewing box I'm so proud of. And the wrapping paper collection in the briefcase! Gaah!

Now, even if the house treatment is successful, I'll still have to re-treat everything I take out of the car! And then treat the car! Thank goodness I don't drive very often. Maybe I can just wait until summer and let the greenhouse effect do its work.

(I left the freezer stuff in the freezer for good measure. I'll take it out after I'm sure my 3 stooges don't wake up).