How would you like your ants

Life is full of little problems and sometimes they come in great numbers. A little over a week ago, or perhaps it was two, I got to my dining table and found that there were ants in the muesli I had been saving for special occasions. I shook the bag – that usually disturbs them enough to make them scramble for the little hole through which they had come. The only problem with this was that it also disturbed the content of the bag, seriously hampering any evacuation attempts they made. I ended up pouring the whole thing into a flat plastic container with a lid and when I couldn’t tease more ants out I folded a piece of soft tissue paper, put it in a corner of the container, put the lid on and left it in the fridge a couple of hours before I took the tissue paper and the few assembled ants out. I repeated the treatment once and think I got them all.

The ants, however, had been so encouraged by the supply of food that they were not deterred by the slight setback of the muesli and immediately went into the toaster.

Toasted ants are probably full of good protein, but I still prefer my peanut-butter-chocolate-spread-and-banana sandwich to be without ants so I cleaned it as best I could. It has a removable tray at the bottom which needed to have every crumb removed before the toaster was safe. Keeping a toaster free of crumbs is not easy so I ended up heating it up and then putting it on top of my fridge – the ants haven’t found it yet.

One should think that that my peanut-butter-chocolate-spread-and-banana sandwich would be safe now, but things aren’t that easy.

The bread box had a little hole in the corner of the lid and before long the bread was crawling in ants. Last time this happened my ayah baked the bread which made the ants crawl as far away, the only way they could; into the bread before they died from the heat. That is how I know I don’t like them in my peanut-butter-chocolate-spread-and-banana sandwich. I had learned my lesson and simply gently brushed the ants off into the sink and decided that from now on my bread would have to be in the fridge, even if that does make it hard.

There was now nothing left on my dining table that didn’t have a screw on lid on it – except for the powdered milk so that is where they went. I spent a good hour rescuing the poor ants from the milk powder. As soon as I tried to scope one out the surface would disappear under four others. I tried to keep track of the problem, but ended up minutely going through the whole container until every little wriggling black spot had been removed. Finally I had learned my lesson and there were no more ants on my dining table – except for when I was eating and they would scamper down from the ceiling to see if they could eat the toast out of my hands.

Then came the kitchen; they found a way into a plastic container and into a packet of noodles. Fortunately we could wash them right of the noodles before Alan, a shorttermer, cooked a delicious Chinese meal for me. I checked every other container on the shelf in my kitchen. I think the ants were watching. I didn’t find any more ants so I heaved a sigh of relief right until I pulled out the wooden ladle which was crawling in ants. They were eating the end of it. I silently blamed Alan for not having cleaned it. It is kind of nice to be able to blame someone, even when I have to be humble enough to not do it to his face. I scrubbed the ladle with soap and put it back in the tray. It was crawling in ants almost instantaneously again and it probably wasn’t Alan who washed it in the first place anyway.

I said the ants were watching for the next day they were in one of the containers I had checked. They were eating dry spaghetti. There were no ants in the bag when I checked the day before, but they had managed to find a weak point in the metal lid on my spaghetti tin, pried it open and gone straight through the plastic bag to munch on my spaghetti.

These ants are persistent and hard working. I don’t know what they will be in when I get home today. I just wonder if the ants pray as much as I do about life's problems and I pledge to be as diligent as they in solving the problems that I face.