AND THE ANTS SAID ... "HEIL, UNCLE BOB!"

Well ... our 24 hours of quarantine are up.

We ... meaning my son and I ... still have pink eye. But it's no longer contagious and you really can't tell. Our eyes are no longer red, gooey and puffy like a porn star's coochie after a long day of work so we are allowed to go back to daycare and work respectively.

We still need to take our eye drops three times a day until the end of the day Sunday to fight off the infection. This is no problem for me. For the little one, this pisses him off immensely. He HATES eye drops. He'd rather have his little baby arms twisted until they crack before he has one more drop put in his eye.

Which ... if he keeps on doing what he's doing when I try to put them in there ... could be accomodated.

Actually, it's been a wonderful bonding experience for the two of us, this pink eye thing.

Not as fun as taking him to his first strip club. But we had some good laughs yesterday as we both stayed home and played.

But damn. I am SOOOO ready to go back to work now. I've got deadlines quickly approaching and the LAST thing I needed was to miss two days of work.

While most people will have a three day weekend this weekend...not me. I'll be busting my hump this weekend at the office, trying to get a book finished.

Damned procrastinators. Line 'em all up and shoot 'em dead.

Screw around with me and make me miss one of my rare three-day weekends, will ya?

Bastards.

I got the shock of my life yesterday afternoon.

Conducting business from my home, I called Kelly the Realtor to ask her if she had gotten our closing date yet.

I've learned something about Kelly recently. As much as she loves the Lord and puts everything in His hands ... she's a damned liar.

Every time I call her to ask her something (maybe twice a month or so), she "just found out" whatever it is I'm calling for and was "just about to call me".

For instance...our closing date. Last Thursday, she said she'd call me this week to tell me our closing date.

Since it was Wednesday and I still hadn't heard anything, I thought I'd call her.

She had "just found out" our closing date.

I call bullshit.

She had just not bothered to call me with it.

This kinda ticks me off, but I'm cool with it.

Anyway... to the best of our estimation, the closing date would be September 30th. Because on July 30th, we were told we were "60 days away" from closing, which would lead you to believe that we were closing September 30th. Once again...you mathematically challenged people stop me if I'm going too fast here. But sixty days is two months and two months from July 30th is September 30th.

I'm no Einstein, but I have my moments.

Kelly gave me the date yesterday.

...September 16th.

Rather than being over a month away, we are now looking at two and a half weeks away.

This is great in a way. Great that we are getting out of this hellhole of an apartment (more on that later) and great that we'll be in our dream home that much sooner.

But this sucks. Sucks because we were supposed to give the apartment complex 30 days notice when leaving. This means that I gave them the notice yesterday and even though we'll probably be moving out of here Tuesday, September 17th ... we have to pay rent until the 28th.

No ifs, ands or buts.

Sucks because now I have to scurry and line up a moving company to move us.

Sucks because I have to scurry and get the cable guy, the computer guy (Internet service at home...FINALLY!!!) and all that jazz turned on and working.

But I guess the good outweighs the bad this time, so we're kinda happy.

I'm just in shock because...technically, they're saying that in seven days, the house will be done.

The crews take all next week off, so nothing will be done to the house then.

They'll work today and tomorrow. And then the week of the 8th for five days. And on the 16th, we have our walk through and closing. I just don't see it all getting done in that time. Maybe they're going to end up working on our house next week, which sucks for them, because that's their designated vacation week. If they have to work on our house during their vacation, I can imagine there will be lots of disgruntled workers finishing up my home.

Which means lots of vengeful acts done on my home when nobody's looking.

Which means that somebody's bound to take a dump on our floor moments before the carpet is laid and our house reek of builder poop for several years and we can't figure out why or something.

The reason it's getting done so quickly is because Fred Wilson, the owner of the company, took over the work being done on the house from Tad the Builder.

Kelly even admitted that Tad was "lollygagging" on our house while Fred has made sure that there are different teams of people putting that house together daily with visible results being made on a daily basis.

Speaking of visible results on the house...the stereo guys came by the house to install the speakers in the ceiling yesterday.

We wanted speakers in our master bathroom...one over each vanity so that when you took a nice soothing jacuzzi, you could rock out to Ted Nugent, offering a contrast that would rock your socks off.

Where did they put the speakers?

In the bedroom.

Not the BATHroom....the BEDroom.

They look nice in the bedroom ... I'll give them that.

But they have cut holes in the ceiling to put these speakers in there. Now, they're going to have to go in there, patch the holes up and move the speakers to the bathroom.

I told Susie that when I talk to the guy today, I'm going to discretely suggest that they leave the speakers in the bedroom FOR FREE and put an extra pair in the bathroom because I'm "afraid" that they won't be able to make my ceiling look like new again.

Plus, it's gotta be a hassle to repair the ceiling now. They're going to have to contact Fred who's going to have to call the drywall guy and the guy who makes the fancy swirl crap design on the ceiling back out to fix this crap.

To MEEEE, it would be easier to just say "Well, Uncle Bob...you just got yourself a free pair of bedroom speakers" than to have to admit to a builder that you can't follow directions worth a crap and now he's got to call and arrange for people to come back out and repair the damage you've done to a home.

I mean...we're talking a $350 loss to the stereo company.

I'd eat that if I were them.

But we'll see.

Maybe this isn't as difficult to fix as I think it would be.

Soooo...the apartment....

Houston...we have ants.

Not just a few ants...we're talking....well....okay....more "a few" than thousands.

But ants nevertheless.

I noticed them yesterday when I went to the closet to gather some clothing to cover my well-sculpted body.

Ants all over my wife's clothes.

None on mine.

Naturally, the logical solution would be that since they're all over someone else's clothing, you just shrug and walk away, right?

Well ... me being Mr. Nice Guy and all ... I started picking the ants off her clothes and squeezing them to death.

But every time I did this, there would be another one pop up in its place.

This went on for an hour. For one solid hour, I plucked ants off my wife's clothes and killed them.

I killed a literal shitload of ants.

When all was said and done, I guess I got all the ants killed.

I then began washing her clothes. Everything that wasn't dry clean only got thrown in the washer.

I then cleaned out the closet completely, putting everything in the bathtub.

I then vacuumed out the entire closet thoroughly, trying to find a trail of ants on the walls.

There were none. I can't figure out how they got in here.

By this point, Andrew had woken up from his nap. So I went to get him up.

I put him on his changing table to change his diaper.

There were five ants on the wall behind his changing table.

I pulled the table out from the wall and there was a trail of them from the window to the wall.

Naturally, this gives me a severe case of the heebie jeebies ... the crawling bug edition. Where you can't help but feel like you have ants crawling around on your body. I haven't felt like this since I took that bad acid in college back in '82.

I called the office and told them we had ants in our apartment and needed an exterminator to come out here and exterminate the hell out of them.

They said it would be today or tomorrow before they could get someone out here.

Which I guess is okay since I killed every ant I could see.

But you know what they say ... for every ant you can see, there are a million out there that are unemployed and looking for ant work and have families to feed and will reduce themselves to being little ant whores to put bread crumbs on the table.

And yesterday, I killed several of these poor ant souls.

I am like the Hitler of the Ant World.

Don't mess with me, Ants.

I watched a full hour of "American Idol" for the first time last night.

I have but one question.

Why?