Keeping In Touch

We're really really looking forwards to our visitors from Saskatoon. This morning, though, we found visitors that we didn't want. The kitchen floor was black with ants. Little teeny-tiny ants, apparently "grease ants" since they seemed to be ignoring the sugar-ant traps that we had around (we'd been invaded before, but not this exuberantly. ExuberANTly. Heh.) Something, apparently in the kitchen garbage, had drawn them in from our backyard, a distance of about 7 meters and through a patio door. I swear the garbage didn't smell that bad.

They were in a neat marching line, about a centimeter wide with a few foraging tributaries, for almost all the distance until they got to the region of the garbage can where they turned into a "freaked-out mess" in the words of a friend of ours who had had the same problem.

So a quick trip to the hardware store (which has an entire aisle of anti-ant products, our first clue that this is not a problem unique to us) produced an orange-peel based spray which, in addition to smelling really quite pleasant (pleasANT. Heh.) kills the little suckers on contact and repels future invasions. and is not so extravagantly (extravagANTly. Heh. OK, I'll stop) toxic as Raid and sprays of that ilk.

I think there's a story in here somewhere. If only Leiningen had had "Orange Guard."