How hard do I work to keep from going to bed at night? Well, last night at midnight I was rearranging the furniture in the living room. I decided I wanted the new sofa on the other side of the room for two reasons.

First, so I could angle it for the best view of the television set. Now, I could have just left it on the window side of the room and angled it from there, but that leads to the second reason I was moving furniture in the middle of the night. I'm right-handed, you see, and I need my coffee (or Diet Dew) and my remote on my right side.

If I'd left the sofa on the left side of the room, I would have had to try to manipulate all these things left-handed (as indeed I have been doing so far, which is maybe why I haven't used the couch all that much) or tried the cross-hand approach, which is awkward and often leads to spillage.

I really don't want to spill anything on the sofa I just paid to have re-covered, so instead I stayed up half the night moving it all around the room, then moving everything else for the best possible seat-of-the-pants feng shui (without the usual consultation on planetary alignment and the like), then doing it all again so everything worked right. I might still end up putting everything back where it started, but for now I'm going to try the new arrangement.

I fell asleep twice on the sofa last night with the TV on. I probably shouldn't have been watching CSI at one in the morning, because none of the evidence made any sense and I got the two cases mixed up. Apparently the rock star didn't have anything to do with the magician? I'm still not sure.

So I got ready for bed and lay down on the couch again. I watched the second half of CSI then turned on some music and dozed off. I deleted the program from TiVo so I wouldn't be tempted to watch it again. After a while I decided it was time to get in bed, but I made the mistake of going in the bathroom first.

That's when I saw the ants. So there's another reason I had a short night's sleep, the fact that I was killing ants at 2:30 in the morning. There were only a few of them, but I sprayed everywhere just to make sure. They had to be coming in from somewhere, I thought (brilliant middle-of-the-night logic there), so let's block all the exits and entrances.

There were ants making free use of the bathroom when I moved in here two years ago, but I got rid of them within a couple of weeks and haven't had any since. Two years! With no ants!

That's never happened in the whole time I've been renting places, from San Bruno to Santa Rosa. I've always battled ants, and I've always hated them. That's why I didn't have any remorse about blasting away at them with unscented Raid in the middle of the night.

After that incident, I went to bed and slept like a very sleepy baby. For about four hours, until my alarm went off. Well, that's more sleep than I get most nights, and I did have those two naps. (So it really was kind of like a baby.) Plus, major accomplishments: feng shui and dead ants.

All day today, I obsessed about the ants. I checked back often but never found any. I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine them crawling all over my water glass last night. I expected them to find the minty mouthwash or the berry-flavored Tums by now, but so far there's been no sign of them. This is how I'd like this story to end, with the entire population either wiped out or voluntarily withdrawing. I just wonder how long I'll be squinting in the corners of the bathroom and checking on every black speck I see. Especially the ones with teeny weeny legs.