Part 1 ... The Ants go marching two by two….
So I’m sitting at my desk yesterday right? It’s
coolish and sunny and I’m trying real hard to
concentrate on the work at hand, when all of the sudden I’m distracted by a
small blackish line that seems to be moving in a
steady fashion across the bathroom floor adjacent to
my office. There it was, the moment I’d been waiting
for!
A reason, ANY REASON AT ALL, to be distracted
away from completing the quarterly reports that were
due the following morning. Had a telemarketer called
me to sell burial plots at this point, I would have
stopped to chat. (Where are they when you need them?)
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Anyways, I take the black line as the welcome
diversion that it is, and gladly get up to
investigate. Squinting to allow my eyes the chance to
focus, I discover it is actually a little trail of the
tiniest ants I’ve ever seen. About the size of a gnat,
these ants happily marched single file from one end of
my bathroom door, along the side of the wall, over the
river and through the woods to the cat food in the
automatic feeder. I studied them for a few minutes and
marveled at how each and every ant was committed to
following along directly behind the ant in front of
him. I imagined them diligently making a sacred
pilgrimage from some far away sand mound in my front
yard to the promised land, which was Rockie’s big
green bowl of dinner.
I tried to imagine what that first scout-er ant
thought when he discovered the huge mound of Iams
Hairball control formula cat food there for the
taking? Dinner’s on me guys for the next 40 years!!!
Woohoo!
I’ll bet somewhere back at the dirt mound, there’s a
proud Momma ant bragging on her little scout for single
handedly saving a nation from hunger. I’ll also bet
your thinking to yourself that I’ve finally lost my
monkey mind, right about now and that I need to get
out more often? Just remember that when I started this
story I was working on a budget. A budget involves
math, money or the lack there of, and how not to spend
so much of it next year. That’s only slightly more
interesting than gnawing my own arm off in my opinion,
so I resorted to ants. Bear with me.
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Once the ants had provided all the entertainment value
they were capable of I was ready to move on. Now to
get rid of the ants. This would take some fore thought
because if I sprayed ant poison everywhere it wouldn’t
be healthy for my cat. I was also outnumbered by about
3,000 to 1, so the odds were stacked against me from
the get go. I opted to get a large wad of toilet
paper, and my thinking, (however skewed), was to start
at one end of the soup line and start wiping them up
in one clean sweep.
Apparently ants have an inaudible emergency
broadcasting system that once activated, sends aunts
scurrying to the far corners of the earth. Or in this
case, my bathroom. I barely had gotten a good grip of
the TP before
they were on to me. Each ant went in a
different direction and now I was in trouble. I had
ants on the floor only
this time in a chaotic frenzy
as opposed to the nice little line I had enjoyed
before. There were ants on the counter, ants in the
sink, ants on the walls, up the toilet, in the cats
water, his food, and yes….ants in my pants.
To end this long story, I ended up spraying ant poison
everywhere, slamming the bathroom door and declaring
the whole site a disaster area. Once the noxious fumes
had dissipated, I went in to hose down the bathroom
surfaces, rid the room of residual poison and dead ant
carcasses.
My budget is still incomplete.
Such is my life today.
... End Part 1
Part 2 ... Got Food?
Ever since I put an end to the free-for-all cat food fest down on my bathroom floor, some things have changed around here. Namely my cat.
He isn’t pleased to say the least, because he no longer has an automatic food dish dispensing tender vittles twenty four seven. In the beginning, he looked a little panicked as he searched for his ever abundant meal supply. He’s done a lot of pacing around the house with a puzzled look on his cat face. “I KNOW it was here
yesterday?” Its pitiful watching him wander around in a dazed Atkins starved stupor.
Whether he knows it or not, he’s on a strict ant free diet from here on out. He’ll be getting his meals doled out one at a time from this point forward, so as to prevent another insect outbreak in my home sweet home. (I’ll have nightmares for months after that incident thank you very much).
By rationing his meals out I’ll also be helping him with his weight issue. Whomever it was that surmised “cats won’t gorge themselves like a dog, if you put his food down to consume at his own discretion”…didn’t know squat about cats. I am certain they never met my cat.
Being a first time feline owner, I believed this to be true when he was a kitty, and bought him a feeder that held a good three weeks of food (if this was indeed the case). Rockier however, four years later is rather…well… portly as a result and in quite the overweight predicament. I like to call him “big and friendly.” I’m not allowed to write what my boyfriend calls him due to the foul language and obscenities clause regulating the composition of moral and ethical blog sites.
When it’s all said and done I should have a much healthier cat and an ant free bathroom. Rockie on the other hand, is looking quite dazed at the left over KFC on the kitchen counter. I’d better go intercede."
End Part 2
Part 3 ... Somebody fix the cat a cheeseburger will ya?
Alright! I can’t take it any more! You win, all diets
are off. Feed yourself into oblivion dude, because I
need some sleep for crying out loud!
My cat is driving me into a state of exhaustion. Ever
since I took away his automatic feeder, and started
portioning out his dinner into equal rations twice a
day, he’s lost his cotton pickin mind!
I first started noticing the strange daze in his eyes
and odd behavior during the day. He typically follows
me everywhere I go, stopping when I stop, to lay on
his back feet straight up in the air like a satiated
relative at
Thanksgiving. As of late however, he’s
taken to tangling himself in my ankles, while I’m
walking none the less, to the point of tripping me in
my stride.
Then there’s the endless pacing and stalking while we
sleep. I’m awakened three and four times a night by
loud bangs and crashing sounds coming from the
kitchen.
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(It’s important that you keep a visual in your mind
for the next part of this story, as to the mental and
physical condition of my cat. He’s the indoor version,
litter box trained, no front claws, no back claws,
fixed before puberty, overweight, lazy, lethargic, and
sweet as a snuggle bunny. He’s a lap cap by definition
preferring to lay at my feet or in my lap while I
work, type, sleep, exercise, cook, read, put make up
on, brush my teeth, do yoga, do laundry…pretty much
anything. He’s afraid of doorbells, unusual sounds,
male voices, the wind, flashlights, car rides, plants
and basically any new object that comes into the
house. He’s never been outside to do anything at all
and perfectly fine with that. He wears a purple
diamond studded collar that has a tiny jingle bell and
our phone number on it just in case he ever gets
outside and lost, God forbid.)
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Then the unthinkable happened. We came home from our
Halloween party, and Rockie was no where to be seen. I
searched the entire house, to no avail and no cat.
Fear and panic washed over me as I realized he had
made a break for it probably while we loaded the car
with party food and costume accessories. My naive
sheltered house kitty, was lost outside in the great
unknown. It was around midnight, dark, and my cat is
black…. outside….lost…lots of trees and bushes.
Needles and haystacks came to mind, as did cars and
the numerous neighborhood bully tomcats that watch him
jealously through the kitchen window.
Chase grabbed a flashlight and swore not to return
without the cat. I panicked like a mother with a lost
child. I guess hunger and some instinctual catlike
behavior drove him outside to hunt for something to
eat. There would be no sleeping until we found him.
We did. Two hours later, on the side of the house,
hiding under some bushes and scared to death. He
smelled like dirt instead of cat shampoo, and looked
very relieved to see me. I was torn between hugging
him and smacking his bottom.
The final straw though, came even later during my
eventual much needed slumber. I guess he just figured
Geez lady…what’s it going to take? I was apparently
too stupid to notice that he was still hungry and it
called for desperate measures. He climbed up on my
nightstand next to the bed, and ever so
calculating…knocked the glass of ice water over and on
to my head. You can imagine what that was like to wake
up to, along with the sound of the dropping glass!
His auto feeder is filled to the brim now. Ants be
damned. I’m armed with raid, and plan to sleep a lot
better tonight
... End Part 3
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