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Thursday, June 9, 2005
Ants
Up-north, if you want ants, go for a picnic. Sit on the grass outside, scattering crumbs. Ants will arrive sooner or later.
This is down-south. Ants are such a fact of life. I am tortured by ants. If I fail to completely clean and sterilize all kitchen surfaces each day, if I fail to completely sterilize the kitchen garbage can each day, if I fail to vacuum up every tiny crumb strewed around on the carpet by Sadie and Benny, then lines of busy ants toil back and forth from someplace into my house. In self-defense I must be cleaner than clean. My kitchen must sparkle. And that's not enough. They found my snack food cupboard, high on the wall. There goes a busy little black line.
Lydia guessed that if we interrupted their line of march with fresh lemon juice, they'd give up. Didn't work. With children around all the time, with a small chihuahua here sniffing the fooor, I don't want to use pesticides. I'm getting desperate.
This is ridiculous. No one needs to tell me that all down-south women are cleaner than I am because I know better. I have seen dirty houses. How do people get rid of/prevent ant infestations? This clean business is sick and wrong.
Since I have to be ultra clean, I've begun to make a fetish of lavendar-scented cleaning products, hoping to ameliorate the gloom of all that scrubbing. The other day at Williams-Sonoma, I spent over $200.00 on everything lavendar. There's separately labelled lavendar for floors, counters, windows, bathrooms, sinks and tubs, dishes. Lavendar for hands, to use in the shower, for bathing. Then I went to Yankee Candle and bought lavendar candles plus little packages of lavendar for in drawers of clothing and towels, lavendar to hang on clothing hangers in the closet. Finally at Crabtree and Evelyn I bought a lavendar powder to sprinkle on the carpet, wait 10 minutes and then vacuum. Of course I also bought lavendar water and talc for me. Now my house is clean and smells delightful but I still have ants.
The other day following Benny's recital, I briefly endured the after-reception. A mother passed me, trying to find her little girl, calling out to her. Realizing that she had yelled into my face, she apologized, "Oh, sorry. I'm trying to find Ciarra. She wanted to go home right away to see her new ant farm."
I asked, voice trembling, "You BOUGHT a container of ants and brought it into your house? Deliberately? You didn't already have ants?"
She looked at me as if I'm crazy and replied, "Of course not."
Fortunately, I have a life-long habit of not hitting people who upset me. If I were one of the residents of the yellow apartments, that woman would have been picking herself out of the wall paper. "Of course not..."
Saturday, June 11, 2005 - 1:54 PM
Name:
Tessa
You will have to find where the nest entrance or entrances are and put down ant killer powder. If it is indoors, then cover the ant powder with an old pot so that Pork Chop can't sniff at it. To get rid of the nest, you need to kill the Queen and the workers will take the powder back down to where she is.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005 - 1:11 PM
Name:
doubledog
I bought little plastic things which have tiny entrances all around and are filled with ant killer. The thought is that ants will walk through, eat poison, go home, and die. This morning is see the first result. Where before a constant line of ants toiled back/forth from the snack cupboard, just now there were a mere two ants. I'm keeping hope alive.
I didn't succeed in finding a nest entrance. Outdoors everywhere I got down to look at the ground, there were insects. It's one vast, humming, buzzing, madly busy insect underworld out there in the grass...and, apparently, in here on the tile and carpet. This is what happens to a part of the world where the ground never freezes. It was chilly some of last winter and we had a few brief snows, but it's not like back in Michigan where the ground freezes hard.
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