LDWorldWide

I suppose this is the third year running that we have had this problem, but this time it seems worse. (Maybe the colder, wetter winter made the difference?) Anyway, the problem is ANTS, hundreds of them, tiny and relentless, lining up for the past three weeks in highly disciplined work trains or circular combat formations to attack, at remarkable speed, whatever happens to drip on a surface in our kitchen.

Listen, we keep our kitchen clean, or, one might say, relatively clean. The habits of the actual residents of our 5th-floor apartment may be no great shakes, but, privileged expatriates that we are, we do have a housekeeper who shows genuine vigilance five days a week toward our kitchen counters and floors. We have also imported some ant traps (from Ireland). This weekend, we moved our major appliances — the ones that are more likely than the coffee maker to generate crumbs or drips, including the microwave and the toaster oven — from one side of the kitchen to the other, in hopes that the invaders will be slow to cross the Great Divide. To date, they have not yet discovered the pantry.

But they have discovered the cat food and even a frozen loaf of bread that I left on the counter last week, and they absolutely worship our kitchen trashcan. Yuck! Nonetheless, our housekeeper says that we are lucky. At her afternoon job, she reports, the ants are much larger and have wings.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 12:16 am and is filed under LDW . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.