Remember awhile back when I said that I was “trying to be more loving towards all God’s creatures”? I was referencing a spider in my shower at the time. I’m afraid of spiders. They creep me out but I’m trying not to kill them anymore.
Apparently, someone higher up read my post, scratched his or her chin, and said, “Interesting…perhaps a little test is in order”, and then he or she sent a plague of ants.
I’m not afraid of ants. With ants, it’s easy. I ignore them. I graciously share my home with them. If they wear out their welcome, I escort them outside with a friendly little pat on their teeny ant bums. “Bye now, y’all come back never, ya hear?”
However, when ants mistake kindness for weakness, I have an issue.
One day last week, I came home and found a group of them engaged in a volleyball session on my kitchen counter, several more wrestling in a pool of leftover maple syrup, and another dozen swimming in an abandoned glass of lemonade. “That’s it, Ants!”, I yelled, slapping the counter for emphasis, “Get off my property or else!” The ants lined up and marched off. I thought I had won.
The next day, Spring Break for ants reconvened on my kitchen counter. One of the little buggers even tried spelunking in littleb’s nostril. That was the moment my new found love for all God’s creatures became cute in theory but not practical. And so I did what I always do when a matter requires brute force. I called in a big Irish warlord, highly skilled in pest control strategy, AKA, BigB. BigB was at the local True Value buying ant traps before I could finish my spelunking story, as though an ant crawling into his son’s nostril might somehow prevent the boy from continuing the family bloodline. BigB takes his family bloodline very seriously. Someone has to follow the Kennedys, after all.
He placed ant traps in the corners. The ants snickered. He bought some outdoor traps. They ran all around them in a frenzy and he thought he had them, but then they ran off to a safe distance, laughing and shouting out racial slurs in ant language. Ants are highly intelligent, organised, and sarcastic. Don’t let their cute tri-sectioned bodies fool you.
Then. One day. The ants disappeared.
Or retreated. Time will tell. You can’t really trust ants. They could be vindictively eating the framework of our house and we won’t know it until one of us falls through the bathroom floor while taking a shower. I thought of that this morning in the shower. It was a refreshing change from thinking about spiders in the shower.
Chicken out
Chicken's Consigliere 
It must be a good year for ants. We’ve had several BIG anthills in our back yard and used about two litres of ant killer stuff. I can’t bear doing it myself so my husband does it. Your poor child – an ant in his nose! Nightmare time 🙂
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Oh he was fine with it, Jenny, no worries. He thought it was funny. Maybe it’s a boy thing. I heard ants are a bigger pain than usual this year because of the mild winter in these parts. Did you have a mild winter? I do not think of Canada as a place where mild winters happen!
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LOL that’s just hilarious! Chicken your a comedy genius with the keyboard. 😉 G-uno
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Thank you, G-uno, That’s very nice of you to say:-)
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Most welcome, and most sincerely meant! G-uno
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*you’re G-uno
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I know you know that I know what you meant. I hate when I write the wrong one, too.
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🙂 Drives me nuts. G-uno
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Actually, they went next door. It’s not over.
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Just a little retreat? Maybe they went to get some more muscle? Yikes. Ant thugs.
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I was just thinking about you. About you and spiders, to be precise. Jacqueline, my housemate’s girlfriend was taking a shower, and all of the sudden the water stopped, and much too quickly, the door opened: “Briana! There’s a big-ass spider in the tub, can you come here for a minute?” After Briana inspected and it was determined that the arachnid creep factor was in the adult male coping zone, I was called into service. The poor little creepy-ass spider was half drowned and didn’t even move when I squished him inside of a paper towel. I don’t know why that made me think of you, but it did.
Ants are just too persistent to cope with, most of the time. Briana vacuums them up when they invade, and I always wonder if they are colonizing the vacuum cleaner. Then, as I told Jenny O the other day, I was reading online and I saw a little black shadow move across the right side of my field of vision, and at first I thought it was an “eye floater”, as I have had those in the past, but it was moving a little too fast for that, and indeed turned out to be an ant crawling across the lens of my reading glasses…
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I can understand why you’d think of me when big-ass spiders show up in bathtubs. Or bats. I just hope I’m not thinking of them so much, I’m attracting some. I do feel bad for men when it comes to pest control. I think it’s safe to assume that some men feel the same way about spiders as me. It’s probably a conversation that should be had pre-marriage. Child-raising, money, and varmit killing.
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Yes, there are men who are just as freaked out by spiders as any woman or child. For instance, this poor guy in Australia, who although I feel a little bad for laughing at his distress, I did still laugh pretty hard…
http://loweringthebar.net/2015/11/domestic-spider-violence.html
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That was pretty funny. I hope you recognise my bravery in even opening that link. I was afraid there would be some kind of video of a guy getting jumped by a huntsman spider, which my friend, Shay, in Australia said happened to her husband once. He was trapped in the shower because there was big one waiting right outside it. And then I read about how they like to hide in cars, in places like the sunglasses holder and are responsible for a small percentage of automobile accidents. I am never visiting Australia.
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I wouldn’t do that to you. I’m glad you liked the article. There’s a section in Douglas Adams’ lecture “Parrots, the Universe, and Everything” where he describes going to Australia to consult with a man who was an expert on venomous snakes prior to a trip to the island of Komodo, and the guy is simply hilarious. “What do you do if you get bitten by a deadly snake? You die! Why do you think they call them deadly?”
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Ha. Yet another reason to avoid the outback. Although that means missing out on all the beautiful reasons to go. Aussie accents, Marmite (not really), the ocean, the views, the housewives of Melbourne (I’ll bet they don’t eat marmite. Do you know what I think of when I think of marmite? I think of termite. So marmite is like a mass of termites all ground up to make a spread for bread. I know that’s not what it is but I just can’t get past the termite visual)
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Sort of like termite marmalade?
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More like stone ground termite?
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Oh my sweet flying spaghetti monster I think I saw the video you were talking about. I got curious about what a Huntsman spider is, so I Googled it, and up came this video called “How to Handle a Huntsman Spider” and… No. Just no. He really did mean handle, and not only handle, but LET THE DAMN SPIDER CRAWL ALL OVER HIS BODY. You know that I usually don’t get creeped out by spiders, so, well, this is NOT usual and color me fully creeped out.
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Just as long as none of those ants have a comb-over.
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Haha. Right? Talk about annoying pests
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I keep a cup and card in the bathroom, and in reach of most rooms, to capture spiders. Most spiders one finds in the house have never been outdoors. I collect and release them in hopes to give them that opportunity –much as I was captured and civilized as a child.
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Well, you are very civilised, so there may be help for the spiders, after all, although I have more of a problem with their looks than their manners. Then again, I don’t live in a state that has a tarantula breeding season, either.
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Okay, I’m sure it wasn’t amusing at the time, but a very funny re-telling of the saga.
I once came home from a trip and found my kitchen floor completely covered in ants. Thousands. I wigged out. But a few I can manage. And spiders I generally relocate outside.
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Holy cow, I’d wig out, too! What did you do?
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I so enjoy reading your posts! We had ants. I don’t mind them either, except for there’s a creepy feeling when there is so many at once. Euw. I lined the outside of the house and windows with Baby Powder because I read that it gets into their teeny tiny lungs and they suffocate! It worked, but our house also looked like we spilled cocaine everywhere!!!
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You suffocated the ants? With baby powder? There is an ant horror movie somewhere all about you. The ant killing cocaine dealer. Thanks:-) It is good to hear from you and seeing you blogging again. It makes me smile that I found you on linked in.
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