One of the worst things about dealing with ants -- or any other of "nature's friendly creatures" who are unaware that you do not consider the inside of your home to be part of their territory -- is going to the store to seek out a "solution." These solutions are usually found in the dingiest, scariest aisle of the store. And they always display prominently, on every side of the packaging, larger-than-life images of all the bugs the product is intended to dispose of.
These are creatures that have crawled right out of a Stephen King novel onto the package, and they stare at you, menacingly, as you try to read the instructions. You begin to imagine that you see them start to move. To crawl toward you. The millipede's legs are magnified 11,742 times, and they are all wiggling. You begin to itch uncontrollably, and finally you flee the store with whatever product happens to be closest at hand, and your spouse later wonders why you have brought home weed killer to unleash on the ants.
You tell your spouse, using certain words and gestures and tone of voice that will leave no doubt as to your meaning, that if he wants to go back to the store and enter that horror-filled aisle and have the bejeebies scared out of him by the bug pictures on the package, well, then, he is perfectly welcome to do so. But you will not.
This leads you to search out other solutions that do not involve such mental anguish, which coincidentally are generally more healthy for the environment as well, although you are not as concerned about the environment as with your own comfort.
So you sprinkle baby powder, which you have heard to be an effective device against ants and which does not portray horrifying figures on the front of the container, in a few strategic places. The ants merely go around it. You reason, with that keen intellect human beings have, that if something does not work, the solution is to try more of it. So you uncork the baby powder and pour it all over the house. Eventually it begins to seep out the windows, bathing the outside of your home in a powdery dust that when passersby breathe in, they are instantly bombarded with happy memories of their childhood.
At some point you forget about the ants, and why there is baby powder all over the house, because you really do not want to know if the ants are still there. So you sweep up the baby powder and forget all the unpleasantness that has been your lot.
Until the next invasion.
1 comment:
do you have any idea how odd it is to come home to a floor covered in baby powder? i thought i walked into a giant shake up snow globe - just waiting for a cloud of silver specks to go floating through the room in any time. Now holly's not the type that like messes around the home and things out of place - so can you imagine what it must have been like for her to dump baby powder every were - oh the inhumanity of it all.
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