Ants In Our Pants And Wasps In Our…

It seems to happen overnight. One day, we’re living our lives, going to the kitchen for a snack, and the next it all looks like a freakin’ B movie.

I’m talking, of course, about Rise of the Ants™.

It starts completely innocuously, with a stray forager on the counter and another one on the floor.

Then you walk in one day to unearth your hidden stash of Girl Scout Cookies check out the pretty fruit bowl on the counter, and there’s suddenly an interstate highway of those annoying little fuckers making a trail from a tiny crack under your windowsill to the never-ending crumbs on the counter (because NOBODY and I mean NOBODY in this house knows how to take a wet rag and wipe down the counter after they make something, except me).

We’ve had this problem every year since we moved into this house. I feel a little like the family in Poltergeist that found out their house was built on a cemetery and that’s why their house became possessed, except our house is apparently built on an ant hill and they aren’t so much possessing the house as they are trying to carry it all back to their underground nest, one crumb at a time.

 One year, I came home to find The Husband Dude stripped down to the waist, holding a giant sprayer slung over his shoulder like Rambo with his machine gun, yelling something quite guttural and unintelligible as he fought back the Little Red Menace. It must be an Italian thing, and it didn’t skip a generation because on that same day, I found the Kid, then six years old, in his room, also stripped down to the waist, yelling something guttural and unintelligible as he fought off the Little Red Menace with a Magnadoodle.

The Husband Dude has mellowed, though, in his old age. Instead of waging all-out war on the ants, he took a more friendly approach. He took his shaker bag of Terro (a nice, borax-based ant poison that’s a little less toxic to humans and the earth) and made a perimeter around the house, saying in a nice, calm voice, “Come and get it, muthafuckas.”

It wasn’t until I saw him beating on the side of the chimney that I became alarmed.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I think I found our wasp problem,” he replied, holding up two big pieces of old wasp nest he pulled out of the gas fireplace vent.

My eyes grew wide.

I should preface this by saying that we have also had an ongoing issue with finding wasps inside the house. Not a ton of them, but the occasional lost one, flying around the window or door, like it’s trying to find its way back out again.

The morning of this year’s ant parade, Luna, my little house puma, became VERY interested in our fireplace all of a sudden. We figured out that he could hear something buzzing in there, and upon closer inspection, we found a wasp that had managed to come in from there.

“I think this is how they’re getting in,” The Dude told me.

“Sooooo…you’re reaching your hand inside and banging on it to piss off the entire nest???” I asked him as the panic started crawling up the back of my spine.

“I’ve been spraying wasp killer in there,” he responded nonchalantly. “I just want to make sure I got them all.”

“But…what if it pushes them all into the house through the fireplace?”

“It won’t.”

“But if it does?”

“It won’t.”

“I’m just telling you…if I get a house full of wasps…”

“It’ll be fine.”

Fast forward two hours later…I was cleaning the kitchen and about to scrub out the sink when a wasp flew out like a little torpedo right at me.

Okay…maybe not exactly.

It was actually kind of lying there, looking stunned, because I had just half-drowned it with water before I realized it was there.

That didn’t prevent me from screaming like I had just walked in on an intruder or saw a nekkid stranger in my living room.

The Husband Dude dispatched the offender.

There’s just nothing redeemable about wasps.

No joke…as I’m writing this post, I had the following exchange with my boy…

I’ll admit…the Mama Bear in me came out and I wanted to go home and protect my offspring from the fury of the Wasp invasion, even though my offspring outweighs me and can knock over his Dad with one good shove. Your baby is still your baby.

However, I really didn’t want to have to tell my boss I had to leave to kill a wasp in my house and protect my almost grown man-child. So, I texted his Dad and asked him to dispatch of the nekkid stranger, which totally confused him and then I clarified that there was not one, but two wasps in the house, according to the latest text. Then I passively-aggressively wondered aloud if he didn’t push all the wasps into the house with his spraying and banging yesterday.

And now I’m having visions of having to fumigate my house, but how will I rescue my teenager and fur babies first???

Update: I’ve now received a text from The Husband Dude that the wasps have been handled and the teen can resume his regularly scheduled chores. I have a feeling, though, that when I get home, there will be a solid brick of cement where the fireplace used to be.