DIE DIE DIE

We have ants in our backyard. More accurately, we HAD ants in our backyard. We now have a pile of twisted corpses and wailing ant-orphans. Bwa-ha-ha! Before you think I'm some crazed ant-o-phobe, let me explain my thoughts on buggy bits. When they are outside, that's their world. I won't go out of my way to get rid of them, as a general rule. Some things, like big nasty spider webs and such, I'll tear down for aesthetic reasons, but mostly I like to live and let live. As soon as they come into my house, though, all bets are off.

This is the situation. We had a big ant colony outside the back door, right up against the back of the house and the patio. Here they are:

It's like a big squirmy pile of exoskeletons right there on my very own personal house. Because of their location, some of the more enterprising members of the colony decided to sneak in through our "Top Quality, Totally Secure and Not At All Having Holes In It" sliding glass door. The cat food lives right inside, so they climbed in through some crack or another and got into the cat food crumbs. They probably returned to the ant-hole as conquering heroes, hoisting their crunchy tuna bits over their heads in victory. This will not stand.

I boiled some water and poured it right on their little heads. And thoraxes. Thoraces? No idea. Anyway, I think they're all dead now. I may boil some more water and pour it on them again tonight if there is any renewed activity. If that doesn't work, I have a few other options, so we'll go over those as we get there.

Also, I spray-painted the first of the file cabinets last night. It's taking an unconscionable amount of paint to cover, but that's probably due to the breeze last night. On a calmer day, more paint will stay on the cabinets, I hope. Still, it's looking better already. Look at this establishing shot:

That's some freakin' composition right there. Anyway, that's the paint I'm using. We're going with a flat white paint and a flat blue for the stencil, and then I think we'll do a satin clear coat on top to protect it all and give it a little bit of a sheen.

This is after one coat of paint. It's patchy, but I figured I would do multiple light coats and avoid any drips. It worked really well, so I don't have any drips or anything on there. I'm just going to have to do like 8 coats of freaking paint on this thing to get it where I want it. Le sigh.

Here it is after layer number 3 or 4:

Still a little splotchy, but better for sure. I pulled it inside to dry in the garage as it was getting a little dark. See that spider web next to the pavers under the cabinet? Yeah, that thing is downright sinister. I'm not intentionally messing with it, but I think there's an overachiever living under there somewhere and he's probably not very happy with me right now.

Oh, I also grabbed a picture of our front porch flowers:

The front one is alive but the other two are looking pretty gnarly. I'm going to keep watering and all, and hopefully that'll bring them back or something. I'll keep you all posted, of course.

Thanks for reading!