The Little One Stops to Go to Heaven

Several weeks ago, we were driving back to work after lunch at home, and I started singing "The Ants Go Marching..." John gave me a bit of an incredulous stare as he navigated through the crappy court-bound traffic around downtown Riverside. He must have lived a deprived (depraved?) childhood. He'd never heard the song before!

I took that cue to fill John in on all the antics of the Little One (sucking his thumb, tying his shoe, climbing a tree, shutting the door, jumping and jiving, picking up sticks, going to heaven, shutting the gate, scratching his spine....).

I think John perked up a bit when he heard the bit about the Little One going to heaven.

You know how the vast majority of modern cities and metropolitan areas are built on top of older establishments? It's utterly fascinating to me that underneath 18th century cobblestone in London lies Viking London, and below that lies remnants of the Roman London. They're like a torte of human history! I believe that if archaeologists were to conduct an extensive dig in Riverside, they wouldn't find pottery and stone weapons from ancient human civilizations. No, they would find the petrified exoskeletons of ANTS.

During the later weeks of Spring, John spent a nice afternoon under the crawlspace, decked out in his Hazmat suit, lugging around a gallon of Ortho Home Defense. He emerged several hours later, coughing and covered in dust, but victorious. And for a while, things were fine. Then it got HOT and the frigging ants came barreling into the house.

The ants were bothersome and annoying and seemed to have the resilience of cockroaches. We'd wake up some mornings to see the shower pan covered in ants. Other mornings, they'd swarm the sink. Being that we have kitties, we were afraid of spraying any surface they might come in contact with, but that sure didn't prevent the ants from swarming the cat food bowl and automatic waterer. Oh no, nothing was off limits for them. We sealed EVERYTHING we thought they'd get into, and yet they always found something to munch on or some ingenious way of getting at what they wanted. We'd spray them with Bayer Advanced Home Pest Controller (and, yes, I shamefully admit to gleaning a bit of pleasure from seeing the little bastards stop dead in their tracks) when they infiltrated the house. But the clever little bastards would just re-route their journey and find another way.

We came to the realization that the ants were actually living in the upstairs floor and the attic. We followed their goose-stepping ranks from whatever they were feasting on up the walls and into tiny crevices between the crown molding and the ceiling. We sprayed the perimeter of rooms with the Ortho killer, and they'd be gone. A few days later, reorganized, they'd find another route and go after whatever they fancied. They harassed the cats and pinched whenever we'd sit on the loveseat in the living room (at least bees have the decency to go off and DIE when they sting you!).

Barreling into/out of the crown molding.

When the chemically engineered sprays weren't working, I tried greener approaches like filling a sprayer bottle with a mixture of vinegar and water, and spraying that on kitchen surfaces. It worked for a bit, but later the same day, they'd be back. I also tried bay leaves, to no avail--they just crunched them up and took them back to their nest. I didn't want to try Borax because I couldn't think of a way of using it without risking the kitties eating it and winding up dead.

Frustrated, we got some packages of Terro Ant Killer, which we had some success with back at the condo; the main ingredient is Borax, but it's in a liquid form inside a trap. Hopeful, we put them out on the counter where the kitties couldn't get them. The damned ants SWARMED them, forsaking all other morsels of sweetness and grease.

PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE

The packaging promised the ants would eat the bait, take it back to the queen, and wipe out the entire colony in a Gomorrah-esque explosion of ant guts and gore. Except, the ants would eat their way through one bait trap, and traipse off to some other locale in search of more food, seemingly unfazed. So we started replacing the bait traps as soon as they were getting dry. While this didn't diminish the ant population of the Chocolate Lava Casa, it at least kept them in the same predictable spot.

Then we started hearing rumblings of this stuff called Amdro. It ain't cheap, and we were leery of purchasing more Snake Oil Remedies. Desperate, we bought a jug of it. John put some around the perimeter of the house, and I put some in little disposable condiment cups on the tops of the cupboards, and we waited. The weather cooled drastically for a few days, so I chalked up the disappearance of the pests to the more amiable weather.

Then it warmed up again, and NOTHING. I'm happy to report that we've had three GLORIOUS ant-free weeks! Next spring, we're going to pepper the entirety of the dead earth surrounding our house with this lovely stuff. I still haven't seen any chalk-outlined ant bodies. I'm sure that when/if we ever rennovate the upstairs like we have planned and we pry up the floor boards, we'll be met with mass graves that would make Vlad the Impaler giddy.