An ant adventure

Sometimes cleaning is hard

for unexpected reasons.

Last Friday I decided to do some spring cleaning. I slowed down after that because it was more of an adventure then I expected. I cleaned my oven, and that was a big deal. I sprayed it and scrubbed it. I accidentally broke the light inside so I'll have to replace that. I practices setting a timer for 20 minutes and then taking a break to prevent my ADHD from kicking me off the task.




I next spring cleaning task was supposed to be easier. I moved the counter top dish washer so we could clean under it. I found ants.

I found a lot of ants. Not just five or fifty, an entire colony of sugar ants with eggs. They were living on our counter top. We knew we had ants, but we thought they came in from outside.

It was really cool.  My fiancee is glad I didn't take pictures, but I wish I had. I had never seen an ant colony up close. But it was also really upsetting. There were a lot of ants!

I don't like killing things. I do kill bugs in the house sometimes. I kill silverfish and moths because they are very hard to remove. But I love ants. Ants are magical. I don't like killing ants. But sugar ants are also very tiny. And it wasn't an option for them to stay. I swept up as many as I could and took them away from the house. I caught some in a jar and added that to the collection. I sprayed the rest with house hold cleaner and removed them. Poor little things. But they would have set up a colony elsewhere if I had let them. And they might have come back. Some were even in the dish washer. I'm lucky I caught them before they mucked up the machinery.

I now have a bit of aversion to kitchen cleaning. It's a little too exciting for my taste.

But today, a week later, I managed to remove all the left overs past expiry from the fridge and give the containers a good wash. Happily I'm not quite as attached to molds as to ants, although molds are also really cool.