1 post tagged “yuck”

A couple of months ago, I was heading into our bathroom (and one must pass through the kitchen to get there) when I noticed that either me or Jeani had left an open Ziploc bag with a foodstuff in it on the table. I also saw a lot of little black specks near it. Thinking they were just some crumbs, I continued into the bathroom.

When I came out I set out to clean up the mess and realized, yes, those specks were tiny ants. There were at least 40 of them, all gathering around and in the bag. Gah. Great.

Since then we've been waging a war against these ants. The building's previous owner mentioned that they came around in late spring but, damn, we've got a lot of them. The current owner had an exterminator out and he took care of them, sorta. Our ant traps have had no effect, apparently.

The problem is that the ants started in the kitchen, moved into the bathroom, and are now back in the kitchen near the sink and dishwasher. I'll routinely kill anywhere from 3 to 20 per day now. This event is commemorated by my yelling, "Ant!" whenever I smoosh one. And boy, did we feel weird when Jeani found one in our Cheerios. (We immediately set fire to the entire box.)

Last week, I noticed quite a few seeming to crawl from the woodwork around our kitchen window. I looked at it closely with a flashlight and, sure enough, there were a mess of them there - some were crawling from underneath the kitchen countertop (poorly installed, thin sheet of whatever it's made of). Ick. I actually reached for the Tilex Bathroom Grout Cleaner - bleach and other chemicals - and shot at 'em. I really did.

Since then we've had a nuimber of ants appear on our dishwasher. They're noticeable when opening the thing, for they start to crawl around quickly. Last night I looked in the dishwasher's floor to find about a dozen ants migrating towards a piece of lettuce that was sitting on the dishwasher's floor. And then... I started killing them. Lots of them. I think I got - not exaggerating - 2 dozen yesterday alone.

The sad thing is that they're coming up from inside the drain mechanism. So I think they're just living there, with some of them dying whenever we run the dishwasher. Yuck.

We're going to get the landlord to get the exterminator out again but, in the meantime, does anyone have recommendations for getting these things out of our dishwasher?