The Ants go marching two by two….

So I’m sitting at my desk yesterday right? It’s coolish and sunny and I’m trying real hard to concentrate on the work at hand, instead of outside my window, when all of the sudden I’m distracted by a small blackish line that seems to be moving in a steady fashion across the bathroom floor adjacent to my office. There it was, the moment I’d been waiting for! A reason, ANY REASON AT ALL, to be distracted away from completing the quarterly reports that were due the following morning. Had a telemarketer called me to sell burial plots at this point, I would have stopped to chat. (Where are they when you need them?)

Anyways, I take the black line as the welcome diversion that it is, and gladly get up to investigate. Squinting to allow my eyes the chance to focus, I discover it is actually a little trail of the tiniest ants I’ve ever seen. About the size of a gnat, these ants happily marched single file from one end of my bathroom door, along the side of the wall, over the river and through the woods to the cat food in the automatic feeder. I studied them for a few minutes and marveled at how each and every ant was committed to following along directly behind the ant in front of him. I imagined them diligently making a sacred pilgrimage from some far away sand mound in my front yard to the promised land, which was Rockie’s big green bowl of dinner.

I tried to imagine what that first scout-er ant thought when he discovered the huge mound of Iams Hairball control formula cat food there for the taking? Dinner’s on me guys for the next 40 years!!! Woohoo!

I’ll bet somewhere back at the dirt mound, there’s a proud Moma ant bragging on her little scout for single handedly saving a nation from hunger. I’ll also bet your thinking to yourself that I’ve finally lost my monkey mind, right about now and that I need to get out more often? Just remember that when I started this story I was working on a budget. A budget involves math, money or the lack there of, and how not to spend so much of it next year. That’s only slightly more interesting than gnawing my own arm off in my opinion, so I resorted to ants. Bear with me.

Once the ants had provided all the entertainment value they were capable of I was ready to move on. Now to get rid of the ants. This would take some fore thought because if I sprayed ant poison everywhere it wouldn’t be healthy for my cat. I was also outnumbered by about 3,000 to 1, so the odds were stacked against me from the get go. I opted to get a large wad of toilet paper, and my thinking, (however skewed), was to start at one end of the soup line and start wiping them up in one clean sweep.

Apparently ants have an inaudible emergency broadcasting system that once activated, sends aunts scurrying to the far corners of the earth. Or in this case, my bathroom. I barely had gotten a good grip of the TP before they were on to me. Each ant went in a different direction and now I was in trouble. I had ants on the floor only this time in a chaotic frenzy as opposed to the nice little line I had enjoyed before. There were ants on the counter, ants in the sink, ants on the walls, up the toilet, in the cats water, his food, and yes….ants in my pants.

To end this long story, I ended up spraying ant poison everywhere, slamming the bathroom door and declaring the whole site a disaster area. Once the noxious fumes had dissipated, I went in to hose down the bathroom surfaces, rid the room of residual poison and dead ant carcasses.

My budget is still incomplete.
Such is my life today.