Nightmare on Ant Street

Recently, I've been fighting a loosing battle between me and the millions of little red, biting ants that live in my walls. But wait, it's not only the tiny ones that I am fighting, but also giant ants that come in at night as well as microscopic little black ants that like to hang out in my shower.

I guess my first red flag that I had an ant problem should've been the mound of dirt in the shower room when I first moved in. When I cleaned it up and set out poison in all the little crevices that I thought ants could emerge from, I celebrated an early victory.

That victory was useless when the rainy season ended. Slowly, as the rains became less frequent, ants started showing up again. First, it was just a little mini line that I thought would be easily remedied by setting out a new batch of poison and keeping things very clean. Then, I realized they had gotten into a bag of individually wrapped hard candies. So I just set the bag out on the balcony and left it for a couple of days. After three days, no more ants.

And then, two days ago, I discovered a new line of ants. When I followed where they were coming from and where they were going, I discovered that they had made a party out of the rotting vegetables in my trash. So I used the same method of sprinkling the ants with poison and moving the trash to the balcony. I then tried to sweep up the little critters and toss them out the window. It seemed to work. I then took some heavy duty glue and plugged up the holes they were creeping into the apartment from. 

Yesterday, morning, I discovered a few stragglers with nothing to munch on. So I quickly cleaned them up and set out to make some fantastic biscuits and chocolate chip oatmeal cookies (thanks to a fantastic care package from some friends from America). I shared the biscuits with nationals (they didn't like them because they were expecting the Indian biscuit, i.e. a cookie, and I just laughed at their polite comments that it was tasty). I also shared my cookies with them and the American girls that are helping out for one more month. I like to share the wealth.

When the day was over, I had the biscuits and cookies in ziplock baggies on the counter, and went to sleep. Last night I had nightmares about ants taking over the entire kitchen.

So when I woke up this morning to have an egg biscuit for breakfast, I cannot express my anger or disappointment that the ants had eaten holes in the ziplock FREEZER baggies. Not just any average old baggie, but a double-thick freezer baggie.

And how do you get rid of bags that are full of ants without just tossing them out the window?!?! I attempted to drown some of them, set out new batches of poison, and swept up the mess that I could.

Now, we've had ant problems at my parents' house back home, but nothing like this. The ants swarm even the smallest morsel of any type of food. And they don't go away. No matter now much poison I put out or home remedies I try, they just love making my life a new version of Nightmare on Ant Street with Freddy Kruger being thousands of tiny little ants slowly eating my house and any food I might keep here.

Guess I should go take a cold shower to cool off from the frustration. I would console myself with a chocolate chip oatmeal cookie, but those aren't salvageable from the 500 ants in the bag. Oh well.