Marching One By One

We have ants.

A seemingly innocuous statement--just three short, single-syllable words, and yet, if you've ever had ants, you know just how annoying this situation is for us. As an aside: I'm not fully convinced that anyone has ever HAD ants. I'm pretty sure that either (a) you HAVE ants or (b) you've never had ants. Because for the past week, we've tried everything, EVERYTHING to get rid of these stupid ants and yet, we find new lines of them every other day.

First, they were in the kitchen, so McMoose took some time out of the middle of his workday to spray them with bleach. (Luckily for McMoose, he was working from home at the time because I have zero desire to spray any living thing with bleach, ever, and if it had been up to me, we would have set a plate of crackers out for the ants and invited them to share in our bounty. McMoose flatly refused.)

The next day, there was another line of them in the guest bathroom, where they were gladly helping themselves to the cat food. The cats were not pleased. McMoose attacked those ones, too. Then, there was a line of them above the door. McMoose climbed on a half wall and nearly killed himself trying to get rid of those. Then, they were back in the pantry. McMoose emptied the entire pantry, threw away everything that had more than 5 ants in it (because 5 is apparently the critical mass of Ants Allowable In Food Items, as per McMoose), and sprayed not only clorox, but also wasp killer in the pantry. Because, ya know, THAT'S what you want in the place where you keep your OPEN BAGS AND BOXES OF FOOD. In fact, a full week later, the stink of Death Chemicals still wafts out every time I open the pantry door.

But still, the ants kept coming back. So we moved the pet food bags out to the deck. Then, we switched to new dog and cat food--food that's individually wrapped and costs, oh, a FORTUNE, so that there wouldn't be open bags of pet food sitting around. And then, we moved the cat food from the guest bathroom to the tub in our bathroom because the enamel is too slippery for the ants to climb. Yellow Cat, in particular, is Very Unhappy about this development because the tub usually has left over water droplets from baths and showers and such, so he now spends much of his time wiping his wet paws on my pillow to express his displeasure.

So I've been researching how to get rid of them once and for all and after learning way more about ants than I EVER wanted to know, I've come to the conclusion that really, we're just going to have to move.