The Battle of the Flea began in earnest last night, wherein Edgar and I began our jihad on all that is unholy and bite-y. We began by stripping the bed and washing our sheets, a saga that will be continued at a later time in the narrative. Our next project was to vacuum the entire apartment top to bottom, carpets and furniture and pillows and anything that would stand still. Towards the end a burning smell started coming from the vacuum cleaner, and I'm pretty sure this is not a good sign, considering that this intensive vacuuming is supposed to happen every day.
I then laid towels down in the places that Fiyero likes to lounge at; the armchair and ottoman by our big picture window in the living room, along the wall under the stairs, on the right side of the couch, and along the edge of the loft where he likes to lay and look down into the dining room. Of course, he took that to mean "Don't lay here! This place is off limits!" and spent the evening lounging in other spots. That is, once he came down from the top of the cabinets in the kitchen after the vacuuming was done. So I probably have fleas on top of my kitchen cabinets. Awesome. And this morning, the towel under the stairs was all bunched up like he moved the thing out of the way so he could lay where he wanted last night. Thanks again, kitty cat.
I also had to brush him yesterday evening, which turned out to be a much more pleasant experience than I thought it would. I was thinking claws and teeth and hissing and death, but once he figured out that "Wow, it's like you're petting me! But you're not! And it's different! And I kinda like it!" he was actually very docile about it. The only problem was that he kept trying to angle himself so that I would get him with the brush a certain way, just like he would if I was petting him, so there was a lot of "Stop it! Stay! I'll pin you down! Why do you make everything so difficult for Mommy?" going on.
We decided to wait on giving him a bath until Saturday morning for two reasons. 1) It's been chilly in the evenings and we don't want him to stay damp all night. 2) We don't have cat shampoo and apparently you're not to use Herbal Essences on a cat? According to Edgar. Human shampoo = bad cat shampoo. Which I never would have thought if he hadn't told me. I'm a bad pet owner. But if it means that I can put off my imminent death by "carotid artery being slashed by kitty's hind claws" for a few more days, I'm totally willing to learn.
So, the bedsheets. Back to the bedsheets. Fiasco. FEE.ASS.CO.
I mentioned once a very long time ago that we have a space age washer and dryer from the future. The apartment complex threw it in with our rent when we moved in; the were almost at capacity and therefore couldn't really offer any move in specials, so they gave us the washer/dryer combo and a 42 inch flat screen LG LCD TV (which unfortunately stays when we go). When I say washer/dryer combo, I do not mean a stackable machine. I mean that you put your clothes in a front loading machine that then washes and dries the clothes ALL IN THE SAME COMPARTMENT. There is no moving of the clothes from a washer to a dryer, because THE WASHER IS THE DRYER. I know, right? The downside of this contraption is that the machine capacity is quite small, which means that unless you want to spend your entire life ironing you can't overload it, or bad things happen and puppies die. In addition to that, it's cycles take a very long time; we're talking upwards of three hours from beginning wash to dryer cool down. We've learned this quite well over the last month of living there. HOWEVER. Since the capacity is small and sheets are long, flowing objects that don't tumble and mix together very well, you get in the situation where the sheets kind of become this big ball with a core and an outer layer. I added extra time to the dry cycle because I knew this, however when I got the sheets out of the dryer at the end, I didn't bother to spread them out to make sure that they were dry. SILLY ME. Instead, I threw them on the bed and told Edgar, no, honey, sit back down, don't worry about it, we'll make it later when we're ready to go to bed. And then I put a load of throw blankets in the machine and we went about our business.
You see where this is going, right?
At around 10 we started to get ready for bed. I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth when I heard Edgar groan from the bedroom. THE SHEETS WEREN'T DRY. In that big ball of linen that I pulled from the machine, the part at the center had some large areas of fabric wherein one pillowcase and two large swaths of the flat sheet and fitted sheet had been crumpled together and were still damp. And since there was already another load in the middle of the wash cycle in the machine, we couldn't throw them back in to dry. While Edgar was all about taking a 10pm trip to Wal-Mart (are you insane?) to buy another set of sheets, I was not willing to go out like that.
Did I mention that we do not have another set of sheets? We bought our current sheets a few months ago. They were a necessity buy because our previous set of sheets had finally crapped out on us. They were old, and therefore comfortable, but they were also worn out, and one night during a particulary violent spasm in my sleep, my big toe RIPPED THROUGH THE SHEET. So those sheets got trashed in favor of the new ones. It's never really been an issue to us before to have a second set of sheets because we always wash them on weekend afternoons when we're not using them. BIG MISTAKE, AMANDA.
So after a lot of scrambling, I was able to find an old duvet cover, which we laid down on the matress, and we covered up with the feather duvet that we normally use. We had some dry blankets, but they hadn't been washed yet, so I didn't want to bring them back into the bedroom. THERE ARE SO MANY PROBLEMS HERE. I'm a burrower. I like blankets. I love blankets. I don't care if it's a 100 degree day, if I'm laying down watching TV on the couch or sleeping in bed, I NEED ME SOME BLANKETS. Normally at night, I've got the sheet, the duvet (that normally has a duvet cover, thus, two more extra layers of fabric), and my lovely penguin blanket that I stole from Edgar's mom a long, long time ago. Plus my personal heater that sleeps next to me. And often a second heater, recently rechristened Flea Boy, that likes to sleep on my feet or stretched out between my legs. But all those layers of comforting bedding were gone, and my little Flea Boy has been banished from the bedroom until The Battle of the Flea is won.
And we WILL win. Our will is stronger than that of the flea resistance. GIVE UP TO THE MACHINES, YOU DAMN FLEAS.
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