This is Why I Don't Get Invited to More Parties

Argh.

You guys, I'm gonna be honest: I've been typing for forty minutes here, and deleting all of it. I'm up to my neck in work these days, but not in any ways that make for interesting storytelling (unless you want to hear about how today I would gladly have knocked some four-year-old heads together and considered that perhaps coal mining is an under-appreciated field). I have notes, I have things I want your opinions on and things I want to sort out to figure out my opinions, but when I try and write them out...nada.

I have written all but one post on this blog with a sleeping babe in arms, which is a little like trying to be creative and funny whilst holding a bomb, one without the benefit of a little countdown clock. I never know how long I have and I'm constantly aware of the fact that, with every failed attempt at getting the writing Just Right, I am losing valuable minutes of babylessness. So I get more frustrated, feel more pressured, and, of course, get more stuck. Then the kid wakes up and I have an unfinished post and am still further behind in reading/commenting on all of your loveliness.

Speaking of which, in all of this, I blame you. Yes, you, the funny one. Who updates regularly. With your wit and your charm and your saying-everything-I-want-to-say-but-first-and-better. Who do you think you are? Holding the rest of us to such a standard. Have a little consideration, would you?

Anyway, I have only one more week of work and then two weeks off for spring break, so please bear with me while I stumble through for a little longer. Then my class is over, hopefully work will have settled down, and, um...well, not much is likely to have changed, but surely having two weeks off will find me rested and renewed and riting (yes, of course I know it's spelled wrong, but don't you enjoy the symmetry of the "r"s?).

In exchange for your patience, I offer you...Aunt Benevola!

At some point last fall, my sister posted something on her Facebook page like, "Benevola has discovered that, if you use your dustbuster to clean up cinnamon, subsequent clean-ups will make your house smell like pie." I e-mailed her to ask exactly how much cinnamon she had spilled that she required a dustbuster to clean it up. This was her reply:

"The Cinnamon Story"

So, we had a minor ant infestation early this summer, as we do every year. However, these are not the normal ants, that gravitate towards, say, a dropped potato chip on the floor; they seemed to gather in odd non-food places, like the bathroom. I tried putting traps out (the kind that they feed off of, and then take the poison back to the colony, and poison the whole colony, thereby eliminating one's ant population), but these traps seemed to be geared towards attracting normal food-seeking ants, so they were not interested in said traps.

Then one day I discovered them crawling all over a bottle of peach Schnapps behind our bar. Apparently, a bit of the sugary liqueur had dripped over the side of the bottle, and this particular brood of ants must have been of the Lindsay Lohan variety: not interested in food, but loving their girly mixed drinks. So I placed a drop of Schnapps on the edge of the ant traps, and immediately noticed them streaming into the dens of poison I had set out. After a week or so, the traps must've done the trick, because they all about disappeared...

Until a couple of weeks later. I opened the pantry, and noticed a few rogue ants roaming around on the top shelf. In hindsight, I should've just cleared the shelf of opened food (this being my bread & chip shelf) and left well enough alone. But I was drunk with my own ingenuity for discovering their weakness, and instead took the food out and placed a Schnapps-laced ant trap on the pantry shelf.

Within days, my pantry was crawling with more ants than I've ever seen. Apparently, it seems I had just opened the most popular ant bar in town, and they invited seventeen other colonies to sip on peach Schnapps...in my pantry!! And they didn't seem to be making it home to their colonies to poison the rest--they were passing out on each others couches until they slept it off enough to revisit this bar the next day! I think I might've even spotted the Olsen twins at one point.

So now I couldn't very well put food back into the pantry, as that would just have encouraged late night drunken snacking, so for two weeks, my bread and chips and any penetrable dry food product sat on my dining room table while my pantry continued to be the hot spot nightclub, paparazzi camping out at all hours, really quite a headache.

Finally, I caved, and grabbed a can of Raid. Then I got scared to put the food back, a) because I'd just laced my pantry with real poison (the kill-you-dead kind, not the sneakier, take back to your ant family and kill you later kind,) and b) I didn't want to re-open the party central my pantry had become. So I inter-web searched for a "green"er way to keep the ants at bay, and I ran across several articles about ants hating cinnamon (also, pepper, FYI). So I cleaned my pantry out with soap and water, and sprinkle cinnamon around the edges of my pantry, as well as the edges of my kitchen floor leading to my pantry.

I kept vigilant watch and did not spot a single ant venturing towards my pantry, and eventually tentatively restocked. After a week, I did have to clean up the cinnamon on the floor at least, to somewhat take back control of my house, and my life. Here's where the dustbuster comes in.

To this moment, I still don't know whether the ants didn't come back because of the Raid or the cinnamon, but I do know next year I will just keep a bottle of peach Schnapps in the bathroom, surrounded by ant traps, and hope for the best.

See? Funny and useful. Also, raise your hand if you thought a simple story about cleaning up cinnamon would involve any mention of the Olsen twins.

Baby still asleep. Off to see what you all have been up to.