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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