It's been over a year now...

and therefore I feel safe telling this story.

It's one of those stories that you think is really awesome at the time, but it would take a while to make sure it actually was awesome and not a complete disaster.  Therefore, thirteen months and no parasitic infestations later, I present to you the story of my Hawaiian trash mattress, as I relayed it to Laura Taylor on 3 August 2012:

Can I tell you the story of my trash-mattress?  It's one of those things where you'll either be appalled or impressed (hint:  the right answer is "impressed").  So the [coworker] who gave me the mattress was like, "it's still in the shrink wrap (i.e. it's new!)", but when I got it into my apartment, I looked at it and was like, "this is NOT new." There were little things on it that may have been bedbug things but I wasn't sure.  It wasn't "shrink wrapped" so much as wrapped in Saran wrap or something (which optimistically was the old owners saying, "this will protect it from the elements in case someone wants it" but pessimistically was the old owners saying "gross...this thing is infested and I don't want it further infesting my home so I'm going to wrap it in plastic so that the bedbugs don't go elsewhere." 

At first I was like, "this is kind of sketchy...maybe I'll get rid of it," which made me really sad (feeling stupid for bringing this thing into my home, and such), but then I was like, "but wait!  I am the queen of getting things clean!  'Ask A Clean Person' is one of my favorite internet columns after all!  I can save this thing!" (mostly because I really don't want to spend >$200 on a new mattress that I'm only going to have for ten-ish more months).  So I ordered a pretty snazzy (but still only a quarter of the cost of a real mattress) bedbug protector and bought this little bottle of "all natural" bedbug repellant (basically a mix of cinnamon oil, citric acid, detergent, and diatomaceous earth) from the drugstore. 

So I left it wrapped in my room for about a week, keeping tabs on the surrounding areas to make certain there were no critters escaping (thank goodness for off-white carpets!), and it seemed okay.  Also, the fact that it was wrapped tightly in plastic in my hot apartment probably baked/suffocated anything that was living in there.  The bedbug protector arrived yesterday and then (and only then) did I take it out of the plastic.  I vacuumed the whole thing really well, and then "steam-cleaned" it with my iron on high heat/full steam.  Then, I sprayed it with the Lysol-brand version of Febreeze (kills smells AND bacteria), let that dry, and then vacuumed it AGAIN.  Then I sprayed it with the cinnamon oil stuff, and my bedroom now smells like the cinnamon bears from the BYU bookstore.  Kind of nice, but you don't want to breathe it in directly.  If I had any bugs in my nose, they are all gone.  It's currently in my room drying out completely, and when I get home tonight, I will put it in the bedbug protector and put it on my bedframe (which I will spray a bit with the cinnamon repellent for good measure).  Then I'll put my featherbed/mattress pad thing on top and then I'll put sheets over that.  I'm certain all of that will be safe, especially as nobody else would probably have gone to that much trouble--they probably would have just put it in the protector and been done with it (or worse!). 

So anyway, that's the story.  Also, I am awesome and so good at making gross things gross-no-longer.

I thought about blogging this story shortly after it happened, but I didn't want to have to redact it or make a new post saying, "update:  I have bedbugs."  But no bedbugs, and therefore, I am awesome.