Warning: NOT for the squeamish!

We have ants. Lots and lots of little, tiny sugar ants, and they are on my bathroom sink.

And I don't know how to get rid of them.

You see, in spite of the fact that I regularly pay incredible sums for Aveda haircare products, I generally subscribe to the hippie-earthy sensibility. I'm an Al Gore devotee, a recycler, a composter. I subdue my convertible dreams so that I may drive a low gas-mileage mom car. (Admittedly, I do harbor a white-hot hatred for buses, but I am working on it. It's not the bus, it's the people that inevitably must sit next to me and talk to me. And the fact that, though I know Capital Metro is generally well-run and on-time, for some reason whenever I have to ride it, it is twenty to thirty minutes late. Twiddling my thumbs at a bus stop, being late for what I want to attend, and knowing I have to ride a bus in order to GET to be LATE there...that is nothing short of a small death to me. But, I digress.)

Thus, I am loath to spray poison all over my house. I have two young children, one of whom may have problems from environmental toxins (I've been listening to the voodoo folk from the HaHaSucker Clinic in West Austin,) plus I have a puppy that does NOT need to lose any of the few brain cells that it currently has.

We have had bugs before. It's an old house; we get silverfish a lot, and about once a year, we do get a couple of trails of sugar ants. I used to call ChemFree, the organic pest control company. They were always very nice, but kind of pricey, and I was never really convinced they were doing anything for the bugs other than giving them a nice herbal spa treatment. Usually, I could get rid of the ants with a couple of bait trays, and that would be the end of it.

But, this year, we apparently have been invaded by hyperintelligent ants, ones that recognize my bait trays, and say to their workers "Comrades, avoid the running dog plastic trays; they are a capitalist tool meant to oppress the masses." I put them down over a week ago, and, as far as I can tell, not one of them has been visited, and the ants keep coming.

So, I went back to the store to see what other sort of non-toxic toxin I could lay down on the little fuckers. I found this stuff:


It's this liquid, see, and it's ostensibly "for sweet-loving ants." (That's what mine are, apparently; one night I came upon a carelessly overlooked dab of toothpaste that had become a scene that was absolutely disgusting. And kind of interesting. I found myself watching them for a long time, actually.) But I digress again.) You squeeze a drop of it onto a piece of cardboard, helpfully provided for you on the back of the box, and set it down in the path of the ants.

So...it's been a week now since I put this crap down. This, friends, was what I saw when I woke up this morning:


GAAAAH! I dutifully put down my little droplets, they guzzle the shit up, and then...they DON'T die, they just come back for more, like it's some big fucking kegger!

I am starting to BREAK DOWN. The box on this Terro stuff says that it may take two weeks to take effect. I'm not sure I can wait that long.

Earth: Consider yourself warned. You have exactly one more week to kill these bastards before I pull out the Agent Orange.