Ante Up

There are a number of things in life that can instantly enrage me.  Some of them seem awfully foolish to anyone but me.  For instance, I can go from perfectly happy to irate if my ears become clogged and I can't hear what is going on around me.  I don't know why but this infuriates me.  My reaction to it is particularly annoying to my sister who thinks I start acting nuts.  Also, when I find Lorenzo downstairs mercilessly humping one of my children's toys, I fly off the handle and chase him around the house looking for an opportunity to break my foot off in his dirty little butt.

Another thing (and perhaps a more reasonable one) that sends me through the roof is finding a group of insects inhabiting my house.  When I find them (as long as my impressionable son isn't observing) I scream obscenities and then instantly start itching and imagine them crawling all over me.  Lately, we have had an outbreak of small ants popping up in unwelcome places.  I put out the really mean ant-killing baits and watched their cadavers pile up in my downstairs bathroom but the rest of the little bastards seemed to have migrated into my living room to avoid further casualty.  Many times in the last week, I have been minding my own business, sitting on the couch, watching TV when one of these little idiots walks right up to me and expects me to share the space.  What he gets for his trouble is a good scolding followed by a ruthless slaughter (I know, this goes against the bug-loving pacificity I have been instilling in my son).  Tonight, when I was fruitlessly looking around for a knitting tool that I seemed to have lost again (yes, I have the hobbies of an 80-year-old), I lifted the couch cushion and found a few old items of food (thank you, Eli) and a handful of ants feasting on them.  Once again, the rage erupted followed quickly by revulsion.  No wonder there have been ants crawling on me on the couch!  They live in there!  YUCK!

I might take this moment to mention that because of our daughter's terrible sleeping habits, her crib is still firmly planted in our room, inches from our bed.  Since we have only a two bedroom townhouse to call home, and her crying ways at night would be extremely disruptive to Eli (who's sleep patterns determine his immediate health), she has become our roommate for nearly the last year.  And now that she is teething and manipulating us with her cries at night, she has successfully driven both her parents from their bedroom.  For the last week or so, we have both been sleeping on the couch in the living room.  This might seem more acceptable if the couch was a sleeper and not an L-shaped sectional with room for a 5 foot person on one side and a 3 foot person on the other.  Yes, this is the very same couch that is home to a colony of small ants.  Picture my rage growing, even as I write this.

To exterminate our unwelcome bedfellows, I got out the spray can of some kind of Enviro-conscious bug killer that uses natural oils (cue Billy the Exterminator, aka Eli's new best friend) and sprayed down the couch, knowing full well that in less than an hour, I would be inhaling these fumes.  It is very likely that I will wake up with brain damage in the morning.

If I hear Lorenzo humping anything while I'm sleeping on ant corpses and bathing in chemicals, I might just lose it and end up kicking Mark in the face (after all, his face is inches from my feet on his side of the  5 foot "L").  Then I'm going outside to sleep in my car.