Ants have taken over my lease!!!
Dear Diary,
It is unfortunate for me to say that I must consider moving out and to a place where no ant may reach. Do they make housing that’s fully sealed? 100% no access from the outside? Except for the door that allows me to venture outside, but that door must be fully sealed when closed! No gapes. No cracks. Only to open when I want it to. And I must have my own filtered supply of oxygen. No allergens. No pollution.
Maybe it’s time to go off planet.
I know, I know. I’m over reacting. It’s just ants.
But they crawled up while I’m in my bed! Skittered across my book as I’m reading! Got up so close, eye level, literally, on my glasses! Do they desire the fine comforts of memory foam? Kirkland cotton sheets? The coziness of a fluffy soft duvet? Or maybe it’s the academics. The adventurous stories of a little boy on a little planet wondering what a boa constructor would look like if it ate a hat. Or the fantasy lands of dragons, wyverns, mages and dark romance.
My skin may itch occasionally from the allergies of nature. But now they itch unconditionally. Every tingle feels of six little legs tapping across my skin. I often wonder if they’re just trying to find my ticklish spots.
I’ve found over 48 entrances that these ants are crawling out from. I bet you can’t believe some of the places! There’s the typical underneath the baseboard and through the back door. Those were the first sightings. But then I started finding them from the electrical outlets! I can seal up cracks in the baseboards, but electrical outlets?? Can I even do anything about that? Is it even safe?
I’ve also found them in almost every step of my staircase. I swear they probably live in my staircase at this point.
They’ve crawled out from behind my bathroom mirrors. The ones that contains a medicine cabinet installed into the walls. And even from behind the giant mirror that’s mounted on the wall. I can’t take either of them off without risk of breaking the mirrors. And I’m in a rental, so no way I’m risking that. Giant mirrors are expensive to replace.
But the weirdest place? You know those sliding doors for closets? They’ve got rails on the top, sometimes on the bottom. Imagine the top rail, on the inside, to the very edge against the wall. Somehow, the builders who constructed this left a tiny gap between the beams that created the framework of the closet. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw ants coming from there. I wasn’t even sure what I could do since the space was so narrow. I couldn’t see the actual hole, but ants were coming out and disappearing into that crevice. So I knew it was there. Makes me wonder the quality of this building… Did the constructor workers just decide a lil gap here and there doesn’t matter because it takes too much time to properly measure and there’s not enough money and resources to fill in the gaps? Probably. You get what you pay for, i guess.
The second weirdest place? My shower’s overflow drainage. You’d think they’d avoid areas with such high chances of getting flooded. And we use this shower pretty much almost every day. It was actually quite terrifying!
Let me explain… I wear glasses. My eyesight is pretty poor. When I take them off everything is blurry. And I do not wear glasses when I shower. I can see things around my shower well enough when they’re at eye level. And everything is basically at eye level. My shower is not so big that I have to walk from the shower head to the shampoo bottle and then a few more steps for the body wash and loofah.
So I’m in the shower, scrubbing my body down. And as I bend over to scrub down my legs, I noticed a mass of little black dots. I am immediately alarmed because that’s NOT HAIR. My initial thought was SPIDERS. And then MOLD. And OH MY GOD ITS MOVING! WHAT THE HELL IS THIS!
I almost screamed.
Did I do a lil leap into mid air thinking I can jump away from it in an ENCLOSED SHOWER? Where I can only turn around and maybe take a half step? Yes. I did. But no witnesses can prove it. Not even the ants because I FLUSHED THEM ALL. DOWN. THE. DRAIN.
Now, you may think I’m a slob. Food wrappers everywhere. Crumbs left and right. Open containers of food and snacks just asking to be eaten.
Do not insult me by comparing me to those plebeians. I am the definition of an obsessive cleaner!! I cannot stand crumbs. I cannot stand stains. I cannot stand the layer of dust I currently see right now. Hold on… I gotta.. clean this… ugh..
I am a very clean person. I am also very organized. Obsessively, some may say. No, I do not have the pristine minimal and aesthetic decor. If anything, I’m a bit of a maximalist with all my various interests from art, plushies, legos, books, bookish goods, plants, mugs, plushies, more books, hats, and did i mention plushies? But everything has a home. Every utensil. Every snack. Every “junk” item. Every plushie. They all have a home. But also, I seem to be allergic to everything that moves. Including dust. So. I clean a lot.
I’ve got two robot vacuums now. One for upstairs and one for downstairs. One of them, also mops! And they both do a great job. Yes, I still use a regular vacuum and manual mob. Not everything can be cleaned by robots yet. I can’t wait for that day to come.
Anyways. Did you know. I sicced the robot vacuums on the ants. Plugged up their lil hole and had Bobo, my downstairs robot vacuum, demolish them. Helps that they were crawling across the floor and not on the walls.
And yet, they still came back the next day. And from a different entrance.
And they found my plants????
My plants weren’t even on the floor. They’re actually on plant stands. On the top shelf of the plant stand. They had to travel across multiple materials just to get to the plant. Vinyl, wood, coated metal, terracotta. I only hope that none of them decided to settle in any of my plants. I recently just got rid of the infestation of mealy bugs and whiteflies. My poor plants are already suffering in poor care and probably wants new handlers. I really don’t need ants for a pet.
These ants are more like annoying roommates who doesn’t understand what personal space and personal privacy means. I wonder if you can teach ants about how to be good housemates…. Scientists seems to always find new things to teach their current living inhabitants. Can they please teach ants to understand and follow the direction of “fuck off, please”? I’m the one paying rent here. So unless they can shell out some gold nuggets, I’d like them evicted please.
