November 19, 2002~~4:33 p.m.
Invasion!
Well, I think I have it under control, but there for awhile, I was sure my days were numbered. I had, dear readers, been invaded by Ants. Gasp! I know. It is a hard pill to swallow. At first, they came quite harmlessly, or so it seemed. I found one or two grazing along my countertop in the kitchen. I thought nothing of it. I never have any food to speak of, so surely, their attempts at foraging in MY kitchen would be short-lived. They would not prosper here, I thought. I was wrong. Very wrong. A few days later, I woke to find an alarming number of them marching in a line along the counter. I was appalled. Shocked and appalled. I wiped them up in a fit of disgust and found where I thought they were coming from. I had just heard from a friend the day before that to get rid of Ants in a non-toxic manner, one should try spraying them with dishwashing soap and water. I didn’t have a spray bottle handy, so I used Formula 409. It seemed to do the trick, stopping the critters dead in their tracks, and I left for work optimistically. It was a few weeks before the Ants had the nerve to show their beady little faces again, but show me they did. One morning, just before my trip to Sniperville, I opened my cabinet where one might put food if one HAD food to put, and there, amongst the canned goods (doesn’t count as food) was a battalion of Ants. I yelped in surprise and then did the only thing I could do. I sprayed them with 409 and wiped them up whilst cursing and muttering obscenities under my breath. “Great.” I thought to myself. “As if I wasn’t late enough for work, now these stupid insects are making me even later.” With nary a thought to the movies “Antz” and “A Bug’s Life”, I carried on in my holocaust of the ant population in apartment 1812 (no, not THAT apartment 1812). I could not be bothered with humanizing these pests. No, not me. I called the Apartment Managers Who Never Do Anything to have them send in an exterminator to nip the ant problem in the bud, and they said they’d send someone over. Someone never came. I went to Sniperville. I didn’t get Sniped. I came home. The Ants were nowhere to be found. I was relieved. Then came the shower scene. It was like “Psycho” all over again. I was rinsing out my hair and there, from behind the wall and the shower head, the Ants came a’marching. Two by two, four by four, more and more and more. I wanted to scream, but then I realized, hey, they’re just Ants, after all. How much harm can they do? How many of them can there be? I was soon to find out. Standing in the shower, armed only with some Biolage shampoo and a soggy washrag, I vowed to attack the Ants and damage their army with a battle they wouldn’t soon forget. I doused them with hand-cupfuls of water and they rinsed down the shower wall in droves. HA! I said menacingly to myself. These Ants will not get the better of me! A few days went by. I found more and more Ants dead in spider webs, hiding in the crevices of my apartment, leering at me at every turn. I knew this was war. I wrote a threatening note to the Apartment Managers Who Never Do Anything telling them that this was ridiculous. That I did not have to live in an Ant-infested apartment. That I was fed up. Nothing happened, to my great and utter surprise. I decided that during my weekend with Annie and Omar, I was not going to worry about Operation Ant Desecration. They could forage all they wanted in my bleak cupboards as far as I was concerned. I was taking a few days off. I vacuumed up what Ant carcasses I could find around the house and decided to call it a weekend. But then Omar opened the cupboard on Monday morning. I heard a blood-curdling shriek from the kitchen. “Fucking Ants!” He roared. “That was expensive cereal, too!!!” I felt terrible. The Honey Nut Crunch was completely encased in Ants. They were everywhere. I took note that they had showed absolutely no interest in the stale “Rice Puffs” that had been hiding in the cupboard for 3 months, however. We discarded the cereal battleground and Omar made it his sole purpose that day to acquire some Ant poison. Finally, someone was going to take charge and that someone was a US Marine! I was almost worried FOR the Ants, but then reason prevailed. That night, I positioned several Ant bait houses in their favorite, but empty, cupboard. I watched as they marched blindly to their deaths. I was on the phone with my less-than-helpful mother when she began telling me about Ants and how much respect she had for them. She said, “Well, you can do what you will, but there is a Queen Ant somewhere below your apartment just laying eggs ALL DAY LONG, so you can kill a few, but it doesn’t do any good. You know, ants are very industrious! They have a body brigade that comes to pick up their dead!” And sure enough, like a scene from “Black Hawk Down” the Ants were scurrying to and fro, salvaging bodies and leaving no Ant behind. I determined from the sheer number of them that they must be Mormon. To have a female Ant under there somewhere, doing nothing but laying eggs, and all. The Ants seem to have retreated like Saddam in the face of a United Nations treaty. But, I fear, much like Saddam, they will be back. Yes, yes they will.
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