vituperation

Goes to visit his mommy
She feeds him well his concerns
He forgets them
And remembers being small
Playing under the table and dreaming.

So sang Dave Matthews in my head Friday night as I hung out one of our upstairs windows, clinging to the sill with one hand and feeling all fat and bloated from the ice cream with almond m&ms I’d eaten a few hours before. In my mouth, a flashlight so I could look for my quarry. In my other hand, a big can of Raid.

For the ants, you see.

Ants. In our house. Thousands of ants marching in a line from the window, across the floor of the study, to the bowl of cat food that Tom Cullen still likes to eat from. We had a problem with them a few weeks ago, and thought they were taken care of for good, but we were wrong.

The window in the study has problems. When our house was built, the builder apparently used an inadequate amount of caulk around the various and sundry seams that keep the outside, well, outside. One of these open seams is underneath the big window for the study, and when it rains a certain way, the wind blows the rain up under the sill because there’s not anything there to stop it.

We, of course, didn’t find out there was a problem until the facing around the window started to rot.

Now the window’s going to be replaced (not by me, mind you, because if you look in the dictionary under “home improvement” it says “anyone but Fred”), along with the woodwork around it, so much money that we’re considering letting our homeowner’s insurance pay for it. And that’s using a local guy who’s giving us a good deal on the labor costs.

Damn builder and his shoddy sealers.

Behind me, Robyn ran the vacuum cleaner, sucking up the little bastards as fast as she could. I spotted a few running around on the bricks near me and loosed a stream of suppressing fire with the Raid. Say what you will about it, that stuff stops them in their tracks, breaks their little scent chain, and seems to keep killing them for some time after you use it.

I looked around for more ants, trying not to gag on the flashlight (well, penlight. God knows I’d gag on a full-size flashlight. Not that I’ve ever deep-throated one). The last time we had a problem they were coming in through a separated area around the window, marching up the side of the house in an endless line, their end goal the same bowl of cat food. I sealed that opening with caulk when it happened, soaked the outside of the house around the window with Raid, and we’d been ant-free.

Until now.

But something was different. I could see the errant ant here and there, but no line like before. There was nothing to explain the huge stream of them currently wending between my knees across the floor of the study. Pulling myself back into the house, I lay down on the carpet and looked under the rotting sill to see where they were coming from. There was a small hole there, another place where the rotting wood had pulled away from the sheetrock, and ants were pouring out of it.

Back out the window. No ants. Inside, ants. Outside, squat. I took the flashlight out of my mouth and shined it down the side of the house, looking for the tell-tale movement of an ant-line. All the way to the ground, and not a thing.

“I don’t get it,” I said, while Robyn tied closed the garbage bag she’d dumped the ant covered food into. “I can’t see any out there, and…” I waved at the tiny ant conga line dancing across the floor.

“I’m about to carry this down to the trash,” she said. “I’ll look out on the front porch.”

While she disposed of the bag, I searched the side of the house again—this time above me—to find the source of the ants. A couple of minutes passed, and Robyn came out the front door, directly beneath me. She looked around on the ground. I shone the flashlight down to help.

“Here they are,” she said, and pointed to a spot on the porch.

She bent lower.

“I can’t see where they’re going up the house,” she said. She stared for another moment. “It looks like they’re going in next to the door.”

I cursed, repeatedly, and raced downstairs, looking for a stream of ants. I saw none inside the house. Outside with Robyn, I saw what was going on. The ants had found another area where the caulk was either gone or never laid (another spot that looks like it’s starting to rot, now that I think about it. Damn builder.) and were going into the opening. That tiny opening led to the open area between the bricks and the walls, and the ants were going up that to the second floor, where they found another little opening in the rotting windowsill.

As much as I hated having them in the house, I have to admit I’m pretty impressed with their ability to exploit the smallest thing to get to a food supply. It’s really pretty awesome.

A caulk gun fixed both holes in short order, and the ants stopped coming in. We had to vacuum several more times to get the ones that had been walkabout in the study, but by the time we went to bed, the room was basically ant-free. There was a relapse on Saturday, when the ones that had been between the bricks and the house found another way into the room, but the caulk gun fixed that right up, too.

Damn builder.

I’m selling some DVDs on eBay if you’re interested.