409 Lavanda to the rescue!

Well, the ants are back. The ants have been back for a while, but this morning, while leaving a voicemail message for my friend (the friend who recently lost her husband is moving in with her sister, at least I think that's where she's moving, just got the call last night, so we're going to pack her up today) I ended the call with "...and I have a full-scale invasion of ants in this kitchen, but that's not your problem, talk later."

I flipped out and started spraying 409 Lavanda on everything that moved. Now I feel tired and guilty. We have fewer ants, although they're still coming in through the window frame in droves. I cannot get over feeling as though killing all these ants is a terrible thing to do, but it's not as though I can scoop them up on a paper towel and take them outside, the way you can do with spiders. There are gazillions of them. Their survival strategy, as my mother has pointed out, is that there are a gazillion of them, and no matter how many I kill, another gazillion will be on the way. Last year, I opened the bathroom at one point, and a quarter of the floor was COVERED in ants. What to do? (Reach for the Simple Green.) This is what we get for living on the ground floor in a flippin' suburban nature preserve. This would never happen to me in North Beach.

(There's a t-shirt on Cafepress that reads "Urban Jew". I want one.)

Anyway, I've been reading Andrew Greeley's latest Nuala Anne mystery (Irish Crystal), and I have to comment that this would never happen to Nuala Anne McGrail. The ants, I mean. But I'll have to dedicate an entire post to Nuala Anne to explain why. I may just do that. Have you ever been completely addicted to a series of books that just annoyed you, even as you munched them like popcorn? That's me and Father Greeley's Nuala.

Anyway, need to go and eat breakfast in my lavender-scented kitchen, and take a shower. Then I need to pick six fifty in change out of my change jar so I can make it to San Rafael and back. BOY am I glad I'm getting paid on Friday!