Tonight at the Food Lion:
CASHIER: How are you tonight?
ME: Good. You?
CASHIER: Well, I’m alive.
ME: That’s definitely better than the alternative.
CASHIER: Not really, because I know where I’m going when the lord takes me. That’s the easy part, right? Life is the hard part.
(Silence)
CASHIER: Um, if you believe that, of course…
It must suck going through life wishing you were dead.
Even back when I was a believer I don’t think I ever managed to convince myself that my life would be better if it were over.
Unsolicited advice from someone who’s battled severe ant infestations:
The Terro *will* eventually work. It’s a slow-acting poison, so the first effect of putting out the bait stations is to *increase* the amount of ants in your home, because they get attracted by what they perceive as an easy food source. If all goes well, their population should crash within a week.
Boron-based baits like Terro work best if you locate exactly where the ants are entering, erase the scent trails to your kitchen, and put the bait at the entry point. Erase the pheromones that mark the trails by putting some rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle and adding a few drops of peppermint and patchouli oil to it, and using that to wipe the trails with. Then use a vacuum cleaner to suck up the ants on the far side of the trail so they don’t return and lay a new scent marker. I stick an old sock in the vacuum hose to trap the ants so I can empty it out outdoors, because I don’t want any survivors crawling out of the vacuum cleaner bag and laying new scent trails in my house.
This is all admittedly something of a pain, but if you do it, the ants stop tainting your food right away and visit the bait as their primary food source, a double win.
Before I did this, it was so bad that I couldn’t even store honey in my kitchen. I had ants going inside the lid threads to get in, and tainting the honey. It was time to develop a strategy of total war.
(Commenting here because I’m not a Twitter user.)
Thanks. I’ve only had two brief infestations in five years in this house and usually the Terro knocks them out pretty quickly. Things were actually looking about 90% better by just this morning!