I was raised by rather practical parents. No sissy girls in their house, no. We were up on the roof painting kid of girls. We were change the oil in the car girls. Yes. Self-sufficient, and often creative when it came to fixing troublesome issues.
If you're country folk, the term "bailing wire and duct tape" is familiar to you. The concept being, with those two items, you can fix anything...MacGyver style.
I'm pretty proud of my redneck ways. Or as my Hispanic friends would call it, rasquache.
I pondered this again this morning as I admired my entomological prevention handiwork.
See, The Good Man and I are convinced our (rental) residence is, essentially, built on an anthill. Not mean like fire ant or anything. No, the annoying little black ants that I talked about in this post. (The Good Man has become a LOT less Zen about them, btw)
Their main port of entry is the kitchen, and since we're not eager to spread poison around the same place where we prepare food, we've been trying a variety of natural remedies (most discovered through research on the interwebs).
So far, the application of soapy water works best. Kills 'em on the spot. But doesn't really do much to prevent them. For that we try an orange oil product made for ants. It works...for a bit. But they come back, laughing.
Most sites I read said, "you have to find where they are coming in and seal that off."
Trouble is, we live in an almost seventy year old house placed precariously on a hill in earthquake country, so there are lots of gaps and cracks and crevices those little sonsabitches can exploit.
So in the heat of battle one day, frustrated and exasperated, I reverted to my "duct tape and bailing wire" days and got out the masking tape.
Everywhere it looked like they were coming in was slapped over with tape. TGM kind of laughed at me. He was like "oooookay".
But you know what? It worked. It didn't *look* good, but we were without ants for quite sometime. Oh sweet relief!
We left the tape up for a while, then took it back down.
As those ants are wont to do, they found a new port of call in a new area, and began streaming in again. We applied soapy water and orange oil and fought the battle.
While going hand to six-legged combat, TGM said, "I'm going to spray this down with orange oil and then you do your masking tape thing, ok?"
And I did.
And, for the past couple weeks...ant free.
We harbor no illusions that we're free of them. I'm sure they are just tormenting the neighbor right now (it's a duplex).
They'll be back. And we'll be waiting with a good squirt of orange oil and a fresh roll of masking tape.
"TOP OF THE WORLD, MA!!!" (click if you don't know the movie reference)
