Unwelcome roommates

Last night, after my cat once again failed to catch the mouse that has been living off of peanuts from a plastic bag he tore open months ago in my spare room, my neighbor (Modeste. He’s 13 and so, generally up for whatever I ask him to do. His past adventures in wildlife in my house include removing dead bats and lizards.) and I set out to find where exactly it was calling home.

I knew it was somewhere in the corner where I had been piling empty boxes for the past three months. Stupid idea. But I didn’t realize how stupid it was until Modeste held up the box in which my water filter came to show me the two-inch hole the mouse had chewed in the quarter-inch thick cardboard. And the three mouse babies nestled inside.

Operation Reclaim my House from Mice started after class today. Two trash bags and four trips to throw out dirt after I’d swept and I think it’s back to being just me and my lazy cat in my house.

This probably made me feel more validated than it should

Over the past two days, I’ve noticed a greater than normal number of ant carcasses littering the floor of my outdoor kitchen. I gave it no mind and merely swept them up along with the normal onion skins and used matches.

This afternoon, I found the cause of death.

I was rummaging in my kitchen when a movement in the corner made me look over at the shelf. It appeared that in the Ziploc bag of condiments I had confiscated from the continental breakfast at the hotel at which my family and I stayed in St. Louis, two plastic containers of maple syrup had ruptured. Somehow a hole had been poked in the bag, and the inside, a colony of ants had taken root in some death-by-insulin-shock pact.

The first method of attack was submerging the bag in water. I saved as many pre-packaged containers of honey and syrup and grape jelly and cream cheese as was possible while the less strong ants struggled to swim their way to the sides of the plastic tub or tried to use the floating containers as life rafts. (Darwinism, man. It’s cutthroat.)

The second round of attack included insecticide. There was no way these fools that had managed to escape once were going to waltz right into my house and into my Skittles and candy corn and Jolly Ranchers.

They didn’t see it coming. Up the wall of my back patio, back into the water, trying to hid under the plastic bag, there was no place the noxious gas did not reach. And as their inch-long bodies lay curling in agony on the ground the only remorse I had was that I was going to have to sweep my back patio after I returned from class.

No one messes with my maple syrup.