Category: Everyday Life

The first time this year

When I rinsing rice, I suddenly noticed it.
It was an ant parade: the first time we saw it this year. We have seen some ants, sometimes; but this time was a big parade.
Ay ya. We thought they were aiming for Kyoku’s bowl, but actually they didn’t seem to be carrying anything with them. Many, many black ants were just busily parading.

We have ant trouble every year. This house has a lot of cracks, and the ants seek out and gather around leftover cat food if we are careless. Even if we tell Kyoku not to leave any food, a spoiled cat of course leaves some. Wet food is worst: it dries out and stick to his bowl. Now the ant season is upon us.

We don’t mean we hate ants, but we tried to put out a product we bought before that destroys ant nests. We feel sorry to destroy the ants’ society, so we suffered them until last year, but not this year. Sorry about that, ants. We don’t know if this product works or not, but we’re trying to use it because we can’t put up with them any more! The inside of our house is not outside. We want to be able to lie down, and walk around with bare feet.

‘The sweet brown sugar fragrance that ants love effectively attracts a whole parade of ants…’ and so on.
‘The pheromone attractor works…’ and so on.
If possible, we don’t want to use things that contain chemicals, but so far we hope it works all right.

Some kind of cat sprayed near our front door, and it’s very stinky! Outside around the washing machine also stinks! We can’t clean it because it’s hard to know where it is. (Just in case, we should say that our house cat Kyoku got surgery before he knew about spraying, so it’s not his fault.) It is now the season when we open windows, and the smell comes into our house on the breeze. Ugh. And it’s inside the house. Even we sometimes have guests! Chris sprayed smell remover, but it still stinks. What we should do, with so much small suffering around us every day.

–YS, 23 May 2006

23 May 2006