It’s been over 90 degrees the last couple days and over 80 for nearly a week. I’ve had the house open and, last night, I found several ants had made their way into the house. This year, I am fully prepared for the ants and I am determined to wipe them off the face of the earth. Or at least the face of the area immediately around my house.
The ortho home defense max barrier has been applied indoors and out. That helps, but my new strategy is a full on Terro attack. Last summer I discovered the outdoor baits. I had one left and put it out a couple weeks ago. It is now being frequently visited. However, there are still ants foraging all over the patio and I saw many crawl over the Ortho barrier I had sprayed down. I went to True Value tonight and picked up more. There are now 7 of them in the backyard and on one side of the house. Hopefully by morning the ants will be noshing away at every station and dragging that lovely stuff back to their nests.
Mowing the lawn today, I was very sad to discover a dead squirrel in the back yard by the new fence. I don’t know what happened to him. It looked like he had just fallen out of the tree and landed there. It wasn’t from my old rat poison. That was all gone before I found the rat weeks ago. We gave him a proper burial, but it was indeed a sad day for Dogs and Jen’s wildlife.
K has been furiously nosing around the back of the shed. We haven’t seen the rat for a while, but this morning when I went back to check on her I saw the end of a tail slowly move under the shed. I didn’t know if it was a snake (which wouldn’t bother me) or the rat. I searched under there, but didn’t see anything.
This afternoon, K stopped sniffing and instead jammed her whole head and then the top of her body under the shed. Much to her dismay, I yanked her out of there to see the rat, stretched out along one of the cinder blocks, quite dead.
I still feel very bad about this, but I’m glad we found it and could bury it instead of discovering it by smell later on.
The rat had been back a few times since Friday, but we haven’t seen him since Tuesday morning.
Perhaps he’s tired of K tracking him through the garden.
Perhaps he heard my curses.
Perhaps he saw the new weapon.
(yes, it’s a pellet gun with a scope).
In reality, I wish I’d had the chance to use the gun. I’m not gun-happy, but I think it would have been a kinder fate than what likely happened. The last possibility is that he’s responsible for eating the full tray of rat decon that I placed under my shed and found empty today.
I hate decon. I think it is immoral and cruel and vicious and dangerous. It makes me ill to think about that rat eating decon - especially decon that I provided. At the same time, I’m also morally opposed to a rat getting into my house and rubbing rat nastiness all over my garden. I’d prefer not to kill the rat, but he has to go. I just wish it could have been quick and relatively painless.
On Friday evening I was chatting with my mom online. K was looking out the window and got the look on her face that all golden retrievers get when they see a creature. I figured there was a squirrel in the garden, so I peered out the window to see not a squirrel but a RAT eating my strawberries.
A RAT. IN MY YARD.
I tried to take a picture through the window, but I could only caught a photo of the tail and the back half.
I called Orkin who promised someone would either come after shift Friday night or that they would call me Saturday. Neither happened (not surprising given the previous responsiveness of my local branch) but I am still going to try to get in touch with someone there on Monday.
I kind of hoped it had left since I didn’t see it Saturday. However, K is very intent on hunting it and chased it out tonight as well. I guess the good news is that it runs away from the house, but still. I will be purchasing a pellet gun tomorrow in case my hunting dog and I can deal with this on our own.
Ok, so maybe it wasn’t a million peaches. It was more like 10. But STILL!!
One of my three dwarf peach trees ripens in July. It had about a dozen peaches on it. They were little, but all yellowish golden red and within a few days of being picked. Every time I’d go outside I would check them to see if they had softened up at all so I could pick them. I checked them last night and they were doing ok. Still hard, but with a new tiny bit of give.
This morning, I reached in to check them and they were ALL GONE!!! Only one tiny peach had been missed by the theives who crept into my yard and picked all my peaches. I am very upset about this. I was so looking forward to those peaches! I have tree nets, but I didn’t think I’d need them for this. Man was I wrong.
The other two trees ripen in August. Once those peaches start showing signs of coloring, the nets will go on.
So back at the end of May Orkin came. In addition to the sermon, they killed all the inside ants and treated the outisde. I will say here that the PR person from Orkin who saw my blog acted swiftly to correct the celibacy-lecturing tech and made sure he wouldn’t come back.
However, the ants did come back. I found their nests all behind the downspout. Orkin couldn’t come immediately, so I killed them myself. There are still lots of ants particularly along the edge of the garden and the patio. I want to give them some tarro or something to kill them, but Orkin says no.
Thus I scheduled an Orkin person to come out 2 weeks ago and treat these ants and to kill the nests I may have missed. No one ever showed for that appointment so I made another one for them to come last week. Again, no one came. Finally, they called me and said “how about we just come on June 22nd like we’d planned all along?” If I’d wanted to wait a month, I wouldn’t have called to schedule visits two other times, but fine. Yet, come this morning, my ants had not been treated. I called this morning and they said they would send someone today. No one came.
So I just got off the phone with the main Orkin customer service line and the schedulewho assured me that, while it was never in the system for someone to come today, she would absolutely be here tomorrow morning. We’ll see. This is all becoming a little bit too familiar to my cabinet doors…
…which I still don’t have! When Contractor Sal came by a couple weeks ago to fix the kitchen trap, he said he’d check on them soon - once Cabinet Guy got back from his latest vacation.
It’s nice to be back and doing some work on the house this week.
Over a month after the new windows were installed, I finally got around to painting them today. I didn’t take any before pictures because I thought I had tons of them from the siding installation. It turns out I didn’t take any of the windows in place. However, as you can see here, the insides were unfinished pine:
I saved like $300 -$400 getting them unfinished, but I did have a few moments of regret as I spent my day painting them. They turned out well, though, and the new handles also look good.
This officially brings to a close the siding and windows project. Horay!
As a side note, Orkin’s coming back this week. I found a bunch more ants outside nesting behind my downspout. I drenched the nests in the Ortho killer (I know, Orkin people, I’m supposed to let your stuff work, but it wasn’t working), but I’m sure there are more little nests around. Hopefully this application of Orkin medicine will take better than the first. The good news is that someone from Orkin read my earlier blog post about the religious exterminator, was properly appauled, and got me taken off his route (plus he got a little lesson on talking about religion at people’s houses).
My fabulous SIL Michelle and my 2 nieces are coming for a visit next week. This has created the perfect excuse for me to get things in order around here. There is still much lingering mess from the busy semester, and it’s nice to have a motivating deadline to get it all cleaned up.
That said, there is a LOT to do this week (I know you’d come whatever the state of the house, Michelle, but I’d be embarrassed if you saw it like this). I got up at 8:30 this morning, my usual time, ready to start on a big list of things.
Flashback to yesterday where I saw an ant in the pantry. I got the great idea to move one of the ant traps that Orkin left into the pantry just in case. Well, those are ant baits. They attract ants. Thus, they attracted ants to my pantry where I found a bunch of them when I put away the box of Cheerios from breakfast. I called Orkin who told me that I had a scheduled visit on the 22nd and I was absolutely not allowed to kill the ants in the pantry because it would mess with their system. The woman on the line did not seem to understand why I was completely not ok with just letting the ants camp out in there for a couple weeks. So I killed them. Windex kills them and it turns out so does GreenWorks. However, there were ants between the spice jars and on the tines of the wire shelves so, to get them all, I had to pull out and wash every little jar of spices and all the other stuff in there.
In the midst of this long stupid project, I had lunch (yes it took that long). When I was cleaning up, I realized that I’d forgotten to dispose of the pods from the peas I picked last night for dinner. I put them into the garbage disposal and ground them up until the drain clogged. I tried a few things to unclog it, thinking maybe it was just the disposal, but no. It was clogged all the way down. Luckily, I have a big red pipe wrench and have watched enough TV to know how to get into the trap under the sink. I was feeling all proud of myself until I realized that MY kitchen sink trap does not come apart. All the pieces were glued together.
I took many many steps figuring out how to get the black pipe from the disposal disconnected from the main pipes. After that, I tried snaking with the snake and with other stuff. I tried shop-vacing it (which seemed to work until I got everything reassembled). After about 5 disassemblies and reassemblies and a dozen calls to various members of my family, Brother Tom suggested I put it together, put some water in the sink and use the plunger on it. That worked! (One million points to Tom are hereby awarded).
About 5 minutes after I finished, Contractor Sal returned my call where I left a message about this poor trap situation. He came over and put in a proper one that unscrews. Now I am prepared with many skills and facilities in case this happens again.
In any case, it left a GIANT mess. Here’s about half of it.
So, by 3:30pm today, I ended up with a nicely organized pantry, everything back in working order, and very very little progress on my list of stuff to do. Just one of those days…
Orkin Guy came today. He sprayed for ants, left me some Orkin literature, and, as he was leaving, spent about 20 minutes telling me about how God had returned to earth in a remote village in Africa. He told me about how people would be making pilgrimages there and how if God chose me to see the spirit I would know. Then he pulled out a few pamphlets for me to read and asked me to call him if I had any questions. These pamphlets are titled “Purity…the key to God’s kingdom” and “Celibacy: It’s religious support”. Perhaps my 3-year-old marathon t-shirt was too provocative???
