First of all, I need a new Kindle.
That's not all bad because it means I get to buy a new Kindle with all the nifty new features that the old one doesn't have. The annoying part is that it did this in the middle of my reading (Iron Council by China Mieville, in case you're curious) and it will be two days before the new one gets here. Oh well.
The second thing is worse and much harder to solve. We have a serious and persistent ant problem. Today we found ants in the peanut butter. (and by "we" I mean Number Two Son) We had to throw out a four pound jar that was nearly half full. I had been buying a smaller size but I saw this big jar of our brand (they had not had the big jars before) and impulsively bought it.
Anyway, these are tiny, tiny black ants - just specks, almost too small to see if there's just one but of course there's never just one. We've been having a problem with them for a while now. I've been spraying with this "organic" pesticide that smells pretty good, like mint and cloves or something like that, and it actually works but only for a few days to a week. We need to find where they live outside and get rid of them there.
I love summer and I'm sad that it's ending but at the moment I'd love a good hard freeze for a day or two to kill all the ants.
Third thing: Very minor but still... I was getting tired of this template and thought I would try a different one for a while but when I was trying to customize it the sidebar kept looking wonky in the preview. I tried three different ones and they were all the same so I gave up and decided to try again in a few days.
UPDATE: I ordered the new Kindle but they say it could take until October 4 for delivery. Yay, two day shipping. They've already shipped the cover I ordered for it but not the Kindle itself.
I get ants periodically. I figure it's a living-in-the-South thing. What I do is close up every single food item in resealable bags or in glass jars with tight! lids. (Peanut butter lives in the fridge. I know you technically don't have to refrigerate it but my mom always did when I was a kid and old habits die hard).
ReplyDeleteI periodically wipe down the counters where they walk with vinegar, that stops them for a while.
Bad infestations (more than a few "wanderers"), I put out Terro baits. Most home-center/hardware stores sell them. Little plastic cartridges with a syrup in them that contains borax - the idea is the ants drink the syrup, take it back home and either die or (if you're lucky) feed the syrup to the queen and SHE dies. It seems like when I use those I get a few days of OMG ANTS (because of the bait) and then they're gone. (Until they come back).
I am hoping for a good hard freeze this winter also.
We haven't had them this bad before. Probably because the EPA banned the stuff that actually works?
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's just that it's 2016. I had "big ants" (not sure of the species but they were one of the bicolored red and black ones) for the first time. Luckily the Terro bait took care of them.
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