Sunday, February 24, 2013

The latst

We actually went 10 days without a sighting of ants. I was caught off guard this morning when I got out into the kitchen. Everything was going along swimmingly until I was almost done getting breakfast started. Then I saw a very large ant, just laying out int the middle of the floor in front of the stove. He was quite dead. I know he wasn't there all along. I surely would have seen him. I had no more than removed the carcass when I turned around and there were 2 more bodies. This was very odd because they must have been dragged and deposited, but it had to have happened quickly because I didn't see it happen. It's starting to creep me out. Finding the bodies all over.

On an unrelated topic, I doubt if any of you know that girls in college during the 40's were required to take a semester of training in working in a hospital, just in case they were needed to help in that way during the war. And that is how my mother learned to do hospital corners when making a bed. So now that's how I make a bed. But I have always had a problem folding fitted sheets. And I'm sure Mom never learned how to do that since fitted sheets were invented later. I did work in a laundry one summer during my college tenure, and learned how to fold flat sheets as they came out of the mangles. I think we laundered sheets for the hotels in town. And I could digress into just how the mangles got their name. But we didn't do fitted. There must be a way to do it neatly, but it eludes me. I even found a web site devoted to that sort of thing and the directions were impossible. Clearly, my sheets are prescient or something. It's like wrestling a 2 year old into the bathtub. These sheets have a mind of their own.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

This is War!

Last week we had bodies littering the counter and floor. Bionic Man went to Menards to buy ant traps. Normally, for indoor use, you would buy those tiny little traps. But this called for more serious measures. He bought the big ones you are supposed to pound into the ground outside. He cut the stakes off so he could use them indoors. They were strategically placed. And we waited. We found a few ants the following day and then just random ones. I was not naive enough to believe that we had routed them or won. This morning I found 3 more, in the kitchen. Two were clearly staggering across the floor. They had eaten the poison. Shazam! The third one was larger and seemed fine. The big one must have come to investigate the untimely deaths of many of his friends, but had not, himself, imbibed. I remember the outcome of the poisoning in the other house. One morning I awoke to find several large ants dragging bodies into piles. I am not making this up! It was kind of like a scene from the Black Death in Europe. And 3 or 4 of the larger ants were really piling up their comrades. The piles were rather large too. I think I needed a tranquilizer that day. We vacuumed them up before we knew what they planned to do with the piles once they were done. Mind boggling. Maybe the next step was burning the piles so as not to spread the disease.


Sunday, February 3, 2013

ants and tires

Yes, I'm back. It's been a crazy year and again, I am hoping to do better. But for those of you who may have read previous posts about the ants that live about me. I am referring to the large black ants, not the little grease ants. We could never rid the previous house of them. I enjoyed 11 years of respite from their harassment. They are back in full force. First, I would really really like to know where ants come from in the middle of sub zero weather in January?!? Shouldn't they all be dead, or hibernating or something? And why are they living with me? Why couldn't they go live with someone else? A friend of mine suggested that I was ant-free for 11 years because ants have really teeny legs and it took them this long to find me. I just killed 6 and 4 more got away. Now, seriously, shouldn't this be a July problem? We begin war games tomorrow. Meanwhile, Bionic Man is keeping the bodies in a jar to be an example to the rest.

Second, I know I have also mentioned the display on my car that notifies me of the obvious. You maybe slip a little on the ice and the display reads "Ice may be possible." So I drove my car for 3 months while it kept telling me the air pressure was low in my tires. Bionic Man said he checked the tires and everything was just fine. Something must be wrong with the sensor. I bought into that, until the usher at our church came and got him in the middle of the service one week. He said the tires were so low in back that he wasn't sure it was safe to drive and he would follow Bionic Man to the gas station to get air. I'm wondering what happened. It seems he was only checking the front tires. I suppose it's like the man who lost his wallet and never checked his dresser because he had looked everywhere else and if it wasn't on the dresser he didn't know what he'd do. So, I guess, if the display warns you that air pressure is low you have to check all 4 tires, not just 2 of them. Go figure.