We have ants.

Yeah, like honest to goodness ants.  They only show up when we’ve left food in the sink or on the kitchen counter.  I guess they smell it and then tell all their little friends about the available goodies.  If there is no food, there are no visible ants.  If there is food, especially something sweet, they swarm it. 

Come to think of it, they are not at all unlike these teenagers that frequent our house.  SweetGuy and I were enjoying a rare quiet evening on Tuesday while everyone was off at their different activities.  SweetGuy made a pan full of BBQ beef and a few french fries.  It was a late meal as he’d worked pretty late.  Within moments of the completion of cooking the meal, Emmy showed up to workout (Go Em!).  She finished and, at our insistence, grabbed some BBQ.  Then the oddest thing happened.  Within less than five minutes Magoo, Da Kaff, and Dustmeister all arrived out of nowhere and SWARMED the BBQ and emptied the fridge of every single edible thing.  It was JUST LIKE THE ANTS!  Emmy… how did you communicate the presence of food to your fellow teenagers?  Do you have some sort of sonar?  I must figure this out!

Back to the insects.  Magoo did some sort of non-exhaustive Google search and decided we could kill a lot of ants by putting syrup on the counter.  Made sense to me.  The sweet sugar attracts them.  They stick.  They die.  Perfect.

We hatched our plan:

Yes, that’s syrup and a little jelly thrown in for good luck.  Now we wait.

Me:  “Magoo, it’s been 30 seconds and THERE ARE NO ANTS!!”

Magoo:  rolls eyes

Me:  “Magoo, it’s been 2 MINUTES… NO ANTS!!!”

Magoo:  puts head on table

We have an ant, we have an ant sighting!!  Here he is:

My name is Indigo Montoya, you gross me out, prepare to die.

VICTORY, VICTORY, VICTORY!!!  He is trapped by the syrup, LOOK:

Thirty seconds later, as I pace impatiently waiting for more victims, the little guy in the syrup saunters away without a care in the world.  He totally did NOT stick to the syrup.  Soon, it turns out our master plan of death resulted in providing a lovely Saturday brunch for all the neighborhood ants:

They eat their fill and waddle away fat and happy.

Fail.

I blame Magoo.  Her response is “I can’t help it if we have STUPID ants!”

It’s back to the Google-drawing-board for us.

Oh, and here’s something only related to the above story by the fact that it happened at the same time as we were plotting the demise of the ants.  DustMeister took a picture of a very cold squirrel outside our window.  Awwww…

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Animals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.