I, For One, Welcome Our New Insect Overlords

For no apparent reason (except perhaps that it's ungodly hot outside), ants started coming into my living room this weekend. Now, I've always been kind of fond of ants--even going so far as to follow them around during recess periods in elementary school, and to yell, "How would YOU like it if a giant ant stepped on your house?!?" at the boys who liked to kick anthills on the way home from school (I was a weird kid)--but all bets were off when I was bitten by one while eating popcorn in my living room, blithely unaware of the invasion in progress. Cursory inspection on tiptoe from behind the couch revealed that there was not just one, but easily a dozen ants marching in through a corner of the front door; I vacuumed them up, flapping all the while, put down a cotton ball soaked with a weak detergent solution to block their pheromone trail, and congratulated myself when there were no ants to be seen an hour later.

Cut to Monday morning, when stumbling around barefoot in my robe, I went to open the living room blinds and found a bunch of ants simply detouring around my ingenious cotton ball blockade. As is customary for girls in such situations, I flailed, squeaked, and pranced away into the ant-free kitchen, eating my cereal with my feet up on my chair while looking askance at the far end of the living room. It then took me like three hours to get ready for work, because I was so creeped out that I couldn't just ignore them; I ended up searching on the internet for ways to deter them with stuff I might have around the house already, and then kept leaving off getting dressed in favor of stalking crazily around the living room with vacuum, ground cinnamon, and cleanser with orange oil. I finally got it together and almost left, only to come back in and move the vacuum to the back patio, lest any ants crawl back out. Luckily, my landlord was right outside pruning the cacti, so I told him about the ants but not about the cinnamon in the carpet, and he's going to put some ant granules out to get rid of them.

And, in answer to your question, I would not like it at all if a giant ant imprisoned me in a vacuum bag, nor if he strewed poison around my house, but until I bite them on the ankles in the privacy of their own home, the ants can suck it.