Not this year, buckaroo

Since things are sort of winding down at the place I'm working, there's less and less work to do. So they kindly offered me a day "off" (off their payrolls, but whatever), and since I'm inherently a very lazy person, I took them up on it (translation: leapt at the chance). Plus, some inspector-types are around today and needing access to each condo, so I'm happy to be here to police the kittehs. Beebs, the far twitchier of my two cats, is already aware that there are strangers doing strange, beeping things in the building, and she's hardly left my side all morning. In fact, I have to keep going back and retyping, thanks to her head-butting my right elbow.

When told that I could have a "free" day, I imagined a day of reckless abandon and slovenliness, lying on the couch, unshowered and unconcerned, setting aside the bon bons only when the big strong inspectors arrived. Instead, as I lay in bed this morning, awake even before my alarm clock would normally have gone off, I realized that it's the 2nd day of spring. An unusually warm spring, if the scientists are to be believed (and yes, W, they are to be believed, you flaming dickhead), and spring means ... ants.

Sugar ants. I haven't seen them yet, but it's only a matter of time before I open my kitchen cabinets to find their wriggling little bodies writhing around in my sugar and making wee tiny baby ants in the oatmeal. I hate them. I hate them with the same passion that I normally reserve for Dick Cheney and regard them with almost the same disgust that I would feel if I found him wriggling around in my sugar dispenser. Sorry for that mental picture, folks, but at least now you understand my pain.

As I lay in bed, I could almost hear them coming, an army of tiny, marching feet, six to a soldier, all of them headed toward my syrup, my cinnamon bread, my Kashi stash. So I got up. I cleaned. I cleaned like a cleaning fiend. I stripped the countertops bare and Windexed t'fook out of them. Everything they could possibly get into was signed, sealed, delivered, it's war. There are sunflower seeds in my refrigerator. The seeds don't ordinarily go in the fridge, but just in case the ants get a hankering for some seedy goodness, ha! Take that, you relentless, multi-legged, nasty little kitchen bullies! I'd get a gecko if I didn't think my cats would try to eat it.

It took nearly 3 hours to get my wee little postage stamp condo whipped into anti-ant condition, but I reckon I've got a bit of a head start on them this year. I'm going to the grocery store later to buy those awful little sweet-poison bait ant traps that I festoon my condo with like other people do with Hummel figurines (the saccharine level is actually slightly higher on a Hummel figurine, but I want to kill the ants, not give them Type 2 diabetes). While I am both an animal lover and a green-lifestyle embracer, I will up the toxicity in my condo to Rush Limbaugh on a blind date with Gloria Steinem levels if it means I never have to flip on my kitchen light to find a colony of sugar ants copulating under the lid of the honey jar. (Or Rush Limbaugh, for that matter.)

Now, three hours and a roll of (100% post-consumer content recycled) paper towels later, I have this urge to say, a la that tiny lady in the Poltergeist movie: "This house is clean." But we all know how well that worked out.