Friday, May 07, 2004

tgifants

Today I woke up with a vision of reading the paper while sipping my coffee and eating a nice breakfast. I even got up early to accomplish this. However, as I noticed the throbbing black line on the stove all my plans were shattered; I had an Argentine ant problem of epic proportions.

Unfortunately Alex and I had left a dirty pan on the stove overnight, and apparently these ants fucking loooove egg. It was so bad that I could actually lift a layer of ants with a spatula. That's how many there were. Picking up the spatula might not have been the best idea, because as I touched it the ants started to crawl up the spatula and onto me. not okay. Of course I did the usual squirm and holler dance while twitching wildly across the kitchen with a spatula in my hand. Because when the volume of ants is overwhelming I have trouble remembering that they are really only 2 millimeters long. I finally got my wits about me and got all ant covered items in a sink full of hot water. Then I realized I would have to put my hand in this sink full of water topped off with floating dead ants to drain it. Maybe this could wait until Alex gets home?

I walked back to the stove to figure out where they were coming from. The ants were coming from inside the stove top. That's right... from within the oven, the thing we cook in. I grabbed my trusty stick of boric acid chalk and started going to town. Until I realized that neither my fingers or the chalk were small enough to get to the ant access. I tried to pull the oven out from it's built in cubby hole. I ended up with a blood blister, a shirt full of ants and the oven in the same spot. I was getting very frustrated and wondered why it is that Alex always is at school when these ant invasions happen. But that was not important, I had to focus my rage, I had to get into the stove. I got out 3 different screwdrivers, flung open the oven door and examined everything while ants covered in boric acid fell on my head. It took me awhile, I had to take all the burner knobs off and release a bunch of greasy screws, but I got in. And there it was... the colony.

The next dumb idea I had (after the spatula) was to not kill the ants straight away, but instead to trap them in a small area between the oven and the countertop. This bad move resulted in panicking ants fleeing and covering a built in cutting board, a drawer of utensils and a small area of the floor piled up with confused ants in a frenzied circle. I had done it again, made more work for myself. I started blotting all the ants up with wet paper towels until I thought about the powerful weapon I like to call Windex.

done and done.

I left the sink full of floating ants for Alex.

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