9/6/07 The Ants Come Marching One By One

While Tony and I were driving down to Chattanooga this weekend (well, he was driving...I was trying to find Car Talk on NPR), I happened to glance down and see a little black ant running around on the dashboard. That's odd, I said to myself, those pesky ants occasionally sneak into the house, but I've never seen them in my car before. I didn't think too much about it; just flicked him off the dashboard (I don't know if flicking kills them or not, but it gets rid of them with minimal amounts of guilt) and continued my quest for Click and Clack. A few seconds later however, the ant was back! And he brought a buddy! TWO ants in the car? This is more than just a case of a hitch hiking ant. This has become an infestation. That's when I noticed that there were also ants on the console! And on the door! And the windshield! Then I glanced down in the floorboard where my feet were resting daintily next to my book bag, and the entire floor was covered with HUNDREDS of little black ants. And let me tell you, it's quite an experience to realize that you're strapped to a seat in a contained space in the middle of a million crawling ants. Very Fear Factor-ish. If I had been driving, we would have run off the road and done a lovely slow motion car-flying-off-a-cliff-while-being-filmed-from-below deal. As it was, I just jerked my feet into the air and started shrieking. (Always calm under pressure, that's me). Sadly, aside from the shrieking, you're pretty limited in what you can do about ants when you're traveling at 70 mph. And even if you do pull over, you can't throw out the books (professors frown on that kind of thing), and you can't ant bomb the car and still expect to use it in the next week. You're basically stuck riding with your legs curled up on the seat while watching to make sure that the ants don't crawl on you until you get to your final destination.

Once we arrived in Chattanooga and I was able to get out of the car, I did an investigation. The ants seemed to be coming from my school bag, but I had no idea why since (and I'm stereotyping here) ants don't seem to be all that interested in statistical analysis. They certainly weren't there when I went to class last time. True, I was working out on the screened in porch the night before, and true, I left my bag out there overnight, but I never thought that ants would gravitate towards higher learning and invade my books. I carried my bag into the hotel room and threw it in the bathtub (sorry LaQuinta). I pulled everything out of the bag, sans ants. Books, homework, notebook, pens and pencils, calculator...and one piece of chocolate that I didn't even know was in there. Ah ha! (So much for their so-called love of stats!) It seems that ants, (like me) are much more interested in chocolate than homework, so they invited themselves into my bag. Unfortunately for the ants, they (unlike me) don't enjoy soaking in the bathtub, which is exactly what happened. Books came out. Water turned on. Bathtub filled up. Ants don't swim. End of the ant infestation, and as a bonus, a clean school bag (which hasn't happened since I bought the thing in the 9th grade). I consider that a win-win situation. As for the ants in the car, I went with a non-chemical trap. (Basically I left a Wendy's Junior Bacon Cheeseburger wrapper with a little cheese stuck to it in a bag in the floor of my car. Ants smelled the cheese, went into the bag, and I snatched the bag up and threw it away. Genius if I do say so myself).

I guess the moral of the story is not to leave your school bag on the porch overnight. And not to leave chocolate in it. And not to bring homework on weekend trips. And not to trust those sneaky ants, because even though they say that they're just interested in Qualitative Analysis, they're really after your chocolate stash.