Ant Island

A Bug's Life...Pixar

Why are ants the one bug I don't mind squashing with my fingers? If you asked me to squash any other bug with my fingers I would squeal and run away like a little girl. Of course, after watching this movie, I felt kinda of bad doing it. I might be flattening Flik or something. I mean, did you all stop eating pork after the movie "Babe"? That didn't bother me...I like my bacon and sausage, but I felt twinges of guilt like maybe the little piggy ghost of Babe or Wilbur from Charlotte's Web were going to appear. How come no one feels bad eating a vegetable? Broccoli doesn't have feelings? Onions make you cry...they must be sad or something.

What started this ridiculous post was the incredible conga line of ants I have had crawling around my house lately. I haven't had company in a while and now I am going to have my mom, my sister and her son, my niece and her son staying with me, so I have been running around really cleaning. Not pretend cleaning. No sirree. Real cleaning. Vacuuming. Scrubbing. Wiping. And every day, a new line of ants appears.

First, of course, the kitchen. They started in the butler's pantry, went up the side of a cabinet like little sherpas, up to the CEILING, down to the upper cabinets where the honey and molasses and Crisco shortening are. They loved the honey, molested the molasses, but totally went orgasmic over the shortening. Can ants get high cholesterol? If so, we should just leave Crisco out and watch them expire of clogged arteries. I was on the phone with JuJuBeez when I spotted the ants so she had to listen to me beyotch as I cleaned and sprayed. I wield my bottle of Windex (hey, you saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding) and spray like mad. This is kind of nice in a way. I get to clean and kill at the same time. Find where the conga line starts and bring out the big guns. Dum dum dum dee dum...Home Defense Max. Spray like mad and no more ants from there.

The next day...ants in the downstairs bathroom which means they are soon marching into my office and onto my desk. Do you have any idea how weird it is to watch an ant crawl out of a keyboard? Quick, I tell them, go for the delete key. Hee, hee. More spraying, more wiping, more killing. I am starting to feel I need a pith helmet.

The next day...ants in the upstairs bathroom and laundry room. Okay, what on earth is in a laundry room they would want? I don't think dust bunnies are edible unless you are a dust fox. This is getting ridiculous. I'm cleaning things I never imagined cleaning until I moved out. Sheesh.

The next day...well, today actually. Ants in the sink. Windex them and leave their little carcasses as warnings to the next batch. Hey, it's 4:30 in the morning and I don't feel like being the great white hunter. Work for a few hours, sun rises, and go back to the kitchen to make coffee. (I only zapped coffee from the day before earlier.) Arggggg....a giant conga line from the sink, up the kitchen window, to the CEILING (do they know I'm short or something?), across a few feet of ceiling and down to another cabinet where they disappeared somewhere. Spooky.

Now, I can't leave this line of black specks and I can't reach all that well, so I vacuumed the little black specks up, jumping up and down trying to reach them all. I hope no one looks too close. My only hope is that this is it. I have sprayed almost everywhere downstairs....no place to go suckers.

Sigh. Teddy Bear comes in and says, "Mom, did you know there is a giant line of ants in your bedroom?" WHAT?!! Race upstairs and sure enough. Another conga line. But this one is really weird. It started in my closet but they seemed to spring up out of the floor from under a box, went out the closet door, made a left turn, zig zagged across the room to a pile of clothes I had left on the floor the night before and were happily making a new place to domicile I guess because I could not see where the line went from there. Okay, you little insects, this is it. Big guns only. This is where I sleep. No mercy. Spray and vacuum.

So now my upstairs is all vacuumed, I have sprayed all upstairs and cleaned more than I wanted to. I am trying to figure out where they are going to appear next. Probably knock on the front door. That seems to be the only thing they haven't tried yet.