authoring destruction

There are still ants:

Trying to get into our freezer.
Periodically attacking the soap.
Generally bothering me.

Today, as I was picking up last night's dishes to put in the dishy, an empty cup that Jeremy had drank soda out of was filled with creepy crawlies. I picked it up, flushed some down the sink, put the rest in the dish washer. We left one alive to take our terrible message back to the colony.

Let this be a lesson! There will be no survivors!

Every year, as I am told, every fall... ants infest this apartment. Tiny, black ants. They are - as far as we can tell - harmless, although they may be the militant little bastards that can do things like swarm and kill baby birds in the nest, etc, enmasse. In here - in our castle - they are harmless, however. They stream about, attacking food sometimes and nonsense other times, until I kill them by one means or another. They're usually here, in my understanding, a few weeks and then they go. Last year they were here before I arrived (in September) and didn't quit for like two months... this year, I thought we'd somehow avoided them.

This morning, I took a shower, draped my towel over the banister as always (I don't dry off in the steamy bathroom, I can't stand it), and went out to buy a laundry sack. Returning from my walk entirely to lazy to go do laundry right then, I sat down to play video games a bit, and then got about wandering around thinking about the actual housekeeping tasks at hand (hanging some new curtains, picking up, and of course, laundry).

All along the banister, presumably seeking the moisture from this morning's towel, the little bastards are swarming. They've come up from underneath the carpet, where the metal banister sticks down into the floor. (Talk about creepy crawlies; additionally, my cats have fleas, which we found out on Sunday. Bah).

So... what to do? Last year, we had a hot pink bottle of Hot Shot ant killer or some such thing. It butchered them by the swaths... I think it may have partially dissolved their hapless little exoskeletons, although I'm not entirely sure it did what it claimed in terms of continuing to kill them where it had been sprayed. I mostly focussed on tracing their little processions back to whatever crevice they were coming out of and giving THAT a good healthy dose.

On the other hand, I'm not very keen on filling my house with poison. That shit reeked, and the LA air quality is already bad enough without me filling my living space with aerosol toxins. The easiest thing to say is just... make sure everything food related is put away, all surfaces are wiped, and we vacuum often until they're gone, but we tried that last year and it didn't really help. They'll go after -anything-, even merely the moisture in the drain (oddly, it was rare that they got into the cat food bowls, they more often went for the litter box... I can't keep either of these things sealed off, especially the latter!) and though I'd love to simply treat around the perimeter of my house, I don't LIVE in a house. I live in an apartment. And forget asking the landlord to do anything... he's a nice guy, but I don't think that would get us very far.

Maybe I'll just take my laundry over to the coffee shop and ignore them. I wonder how many I can vacuum up with the hand-tool on the vacuum? That would be a good poison-free alternative, and only slightly more obnoxious than having to fish out the can all the time. Course... what if they crawl out of the vacuum...