Ants in my pants

I wake up this morning at 7:30 to Arielle half-whispering, "Halley? Um, Halley? We are infested with ants." You have never seen me shoot up out of bed faster.

Overnight, they had come in and were in everything. All over the floor, but especially in the corners. And in my big, open backpack on the floor. With all my clothes. Especially my clothes. Pick up the bag, thousands of ants underneath. The little, black kind. And because they didn't go near the food, I am convinced they are also the stupid kind.

I went to shake out a bra and thousands of ants poured out and onto the ground, scattering.
So, so gross.

We call the office immediately and they rush over and give us a new room and are very apologetic and so nice. I am just trying to get my stuff out of there. My ant-infested stuff.

I separate it into two piles: clean and infested (mostly clothes). The backpack stays in the hall, with stuff to be washed. The rest goes into the new room.

The woman offers to do our laundry, for free of course. I say, I can do it. After a few trips of my hand into the backpack of ants, getting grossed out, she motions and says I should let her do it. I do. I get over the fact that a stranger has my underwear. I am just happy to be away from all the ewww.

But now, the only clothes Arielle and I have are the clothes on our backs, what we slept in. So we spend the day in pajamas because we have no other clothes. Because they are being washed. Because they are infested with ants.

We both happen to have cardigans which were away from the rest of the stuff. I also have an olive scarf. She has shorts on and luckily, I slept in black yoga pants. (It could have been the pink pear pajama pants.) We can't go to class because we have no clothes. (We send word to our professors, and I got a very nice email back from mine, so that was taken care of.) But still, we're hungry.

So we go to the corner bakery for coffee, tea, and pastries. We pass classmates and laughingly explain the whole thing. Why we're walking through town in our pajamas. In fact, we spend the whole day retelling versions of this story, often laughing. Always in disbelief.

Later, around 4:30, we must eat again and go to a nearby restaurant. Where we run into more people. I am wearing the black yoga pants, my 1987 Max Headroom - Coke t-shirt, a black cardigan, and the olvie scarf tied around my neck. Luckily, I grabbed a bra, too, somehow, before everything went kersplooey. But that was all. (Nobody wants underpants full of ants.) Arielle is wearing small purple shorts, a nature shirt, and a long grey cardigan. We are fooling no one. But we pretend.

We come home to find large racks of drying clothes in the front driveway. As in, I can see my undies from the next house over. On our busy street. Awesome. I go inside and ignore it. (One day ask me to tell you about the Great Nottingham Underwear Debacle of 2000...)

It was a great moment when the woman came in, around 9:30p with all my clothes, clean and folded, smelling fresh, including the backpack, which had been cleaned and scoured. This woman is a hero. (Yes, it was their place that gave us the ants, but whatever.)

The new room is clean, comfortable, and has our clean clothes in it. We are basically all set.

I've opened a tube of Pringles and we're going to watch a movie.

PS - It has not passed my notice that on a trip that has to do with going home, in some sense of that word, it has been impossible for me to get settled. First in the dorm, I switched beds. Twice. Then we left the dorm for the guest house. And then the ants and we had to change rooms. Within a little over a week. Just a couple of wandering Jews.