The Ants Go Marching One by One

I saw a line of ants marching out of the guest bathroom. They were headed towards the guest room, but I found they were only crawling along the bottom edge of the guest bedroom door. Then they headed up the hallway towards the family room. I tracked them in to the closet, they were heading in to the pantry. The one I organized a few weeks ago. They are going after the brown sugar, which had been in those cabinets earlier. Apparently the ants couldn't find anything either before I organized the pantry...

I don't like to kill ants because they're cool, but I want them to stay out of the house, I don't want to share. Since I had been having problems with ants in other parts of the house I have been trying a bunch of different things to get them out of the house. I started by religiously wiping everything down, that worked for a short time. Then I sprayed with Orange Guard, which killed the ants on contact and made them avoid the sprayed area; but I couldn't be spraying every square inch of the kitchen or the bathroom. Yesterday I bought some diatomaceous earth.


Today I got a squeeze bottle with a nozzle so that I could easily spread the diatomaceous earth where it is needed. Notice how the ants avoided the white sugar? Even they know too much is not good for living things!

Application of diatomaceous earth to ant column.

I checked it 4 hours later to see what the results were. Not good. They just created another path around the pile of diatomaceous earth that I dumped on them earlier.

Smart ants detoured around the diatomaceous earth.

So I spread the diatomaceous earth in a finer layer and over a broader area in the cabinet. I'll check tomorrow to see what the results are.  

Curtis & Lori came by with lunch today. This is from the Don Quijote deli. It's a mix of shoyu pork and pork spare ribs, with maki sushi for Dad. We were remarking how good vegetables taste when they are covered with pork fat, similar to covering them with melted butter.


Curtis & Lori had dropped by for us to work on the program for Mom's service. I also showed them a rough draft of the slide show and the different thank you note options. I also found 2 photos, one will be used for the front of the program. Here's the one we will be displaying during the service. We chose it because it shows Mom's playful side, its from her birthday party in Las Vegas. We also wanted a current photo rather than something that was 20 or 30 years old. (That's the one we are putting on the front of the program.)

Happy Birthday to Aunty Daisy!