This is war

I hate ants. I mean, I seriously hate them. It's not like other insects I find in my house like big fat spiders or creepy earwigs that I'm mainly just scared of and make Dan kill. No, ants are just disgusting little pests that think they have the right to invade my kitchen. I kill them with a vengeance. I'll stand in my kitchen and squish them one-by-one, but it doesn't make a difference. If I come back 5 minutes later, there are bound to be 10 or 20 more ants crawling around my counters. No matter how clean my house is, they are always there.

I'm not a huge fan of using chemical pesticides inside, especially in the kitchen, so this year we're trying borax-laced ant bait. The ants swarm to it and it kills them slowly enough that they can take it back to the queen and supposedly wipe out the colony. If you need to visualize this:

Yuck. So now we have hordes of feeding ants in some places, and hordes of dead ants where the stuff is actually working. The dead ants get stuck to the bottoms of your feet and Alta spreads them all over as she drags her blanket on the floor. It's all pretty gross. BUT we've eliminated the ants in our dining room and they seem to be slowing down in the kitchen.

The outside of our house is a whole different story. I think Dan is going to be out there soon waging serious chemical warfare against them.

It's kind of strange that I'm writing an entire blog post just about ants. I guess it's proof of how much of my day is spent thinking about killing them.

And Alta's new favorite phrase: "ants are everywhere!"