And I without my picnic basket

It's a little eerie how these things happen. I don't even remember the context, but this past weekend on the phone with Jen Hen it came up that ants invade the front room of my apartment annually, like clockwork, in the late fall as the rainy season gets underway. Not the kitchen, where the actual food is (thankfully), but the barren living room which has nothing but hardwood floors, furniture, and potted plants. Which got me to thinking that I hadn't actually had this problem in more than a year.

Cue the gleeful hand of the Powers That Be.

As I was watering the plants yesterday evening, I was horrified to discover a thronging mass of ants swarming around the sickly little lime tree in the window. These are delicate little blacks ants, easily squished, and of the non-biting variety. But I'm not talking about a few ants -- there were thousands of them circling the rim of the pot in a roiling black sea of repulsion. Maybe tens of thousands.

I stood there aghast for a few moments wondering what the hell to do, and as my gaze followed the trail to the big blue chair in the bay window, I froze again in stupefaction. The upholstery was crawling with the little fuckers to the point where I could hardly see the texture or color of the fabric beneath the writhing hordes.

I have no idea where they come from or why they come up three stories to enter into my apartment and harass me. They're probably nested in the walls with the toxic mold somewhere. And frankly I don't care, so long as they disappear again soon, and never find the kitchen. I've had friends who had these same ants invade their kitchen and wreak havoc, getting inside sealed jars of maple syrup, bags of pet food, boxes of cereal, dying by the thousands in the cold of the fridge. My pantry (and mental health) is in no state to deal with something like that.

Afraid that they might be nesting in the dirt of the lime tree or, heaven forfend, inside the blue chair, harvesting aphid dew or farming a crop of fungi or something heinous, I remembered that I still had a couple murderous ant control stakes that were long past their expiration date. They contain arsenic trioxide and bait, which the ants are supposed to take back to their nest, distribute to the colony, and then die en masse. So I stuck these in the dirt around the lime tree. This had never really worked in the past, since, they kept coming back and all, but it's all I had.

Well, that and the vacuum. Which I also set about using to suck up as many of the bastards as possible. I hoovered every crevice and fold of the chair and its pillows, and as much of the infested plant pot as possible, but there were still plenty of ants swarming around the tree and the poison. I isolated the vacuum cleaner and spent the better part of the evening keeping vigil to ensure the ants didn't escape, crawling back up the hose to kill me. Which they did not.

Tonight, I saw two ants exploring the floor beneath the lime tree, but that was all. I'm afraid to ask aloud, but fighting back the invading hordes cannot be that easy, can it?