It’s the south. And it’s summer, even if only just. And that means bugs. And so far, 2009 appears to be a combination ant/flea plague year. Oh, joy.
For some reason, for the last week or so my bathroom has been overrun with ants. Not fire ants or anything bad, just those little black ants that are endemic to the area. Which kinda sucks. I mean, if they were fire ants or some other dangerous critter, I would have no compunction slaughtering them by the nestful and thusly rid my bathroom of their parading masses.
But alas, they are concurrently harmless, disease-free and pretty much not bothering anyone except for being vaguely exhausting to watch in their endless looping travels out of the bathtub faucet caps, around the tub rim, up the wall, across the tile wainscoting, down the door frame and thence onward to parts unknown.
Also, being a hive mind, they’re notoriously hard to kill off in any permanent and meaningful way without risking getting yourself on the evening news a la this guy. I can pretty much assure you that between asthma and a bad sensitivity to chemicals, any quantity of poison likely to have any effect on them would likely do me in well before I got anywhere near the critical mass necessary to put a dent in their nest.
Fleas, on the other hand, get no mercy from me. And they are, thankfully, easier to kill. Unfortunately, they have infested the entire building I live in, so just treating my cats does little more than annoy the cats and evolve resistant fleas. Ergo, yesterday we did a massive spring clean that got everything up off the floors and sprayed the entire house down with some sort of long-lasting anti-flea chemical warfare (I think it’s got that hormone stuff in it that keeps them from breeding). After which, naturally, we were obliged to leave the house for several hours while it did it’s thing.
Luckily, the local burger-and-movie joint was showing Wolverine, which I missed out on when it was in the first-run theaters due to insufficient funds. So we chowed down on tasty grub and I got to watch a very naked, very wet and very growly Hugh Jackman do his thing. Rawr!
Dunno about you, but I certainly feel better.
In any case, the fleas seem to be gone. However, the ants - after a brief kill-back hiatus that led me to embarrassingly amateur levels of optimism over their demise - are back once more making their merry way around the powder room architecture. *sigh*
I guess 12 hours’ respite is better than nothing. At least they don’t bite.
And don’t even get me started on the fun-house-thrill-seeking wasps that seem to have spread the word among their kind that if you can manage to slip in through the screen door, there are limitless free rides around the ceiling-fan loop-de-loop air current to be had. I’ve had just about all of their barnstorming, dive-bombing shenanigans that I can take.
Tags: ants, bugs, fleas, nekkid Hugh Jackman, Wolverine
