ANTS!!!

I'm a big believer in synchronicity, defined by Merriam Webster as:

the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality -- used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung

Numerous times I've had things come into my life just before or just as I need them, whether those things were ideas or objects or advice.

Over the weekend I was catching up on my blog reading, and found Waveflux's amusing and self-effacing tale of dealing with a home-improvement nightmare. Central to the horror was an infestation of carpenter ants and their eradication by a pest-control professional through the use of "some kind of dust" that the ants would walk through, leading to their deaths and those of their peers. I hazarded a guess that the dust might have been boric acid.

Well.

Late yesterday I filled up the bathroom closet with freshly laundered towels. This morning I reached into that same closet for the pink one on top ... and set into motion a hundred -- maybe more -- really pissed off ants that had been homesteading under the towel.

I really hate ants.

I'm not sure these are the carpenter kind since several of them bit me and I just don't remember the carpenters being that aggressive. Maybe they are and we've just never had this kind of run-in before. Several more ants managed to jump on me and I was still frantically brushing off their biting little selves when I got to the kitchen. I still had phantom ants crawling all over me fifteen minutes later.

What to do?

I could have sprayed them, but that would have just stained and smelled up my towels and my bathroom and would have disbursed their angry little selves all over the bathroom where I still had to take a shower. Then I remembered Waveflux's "some kind of dust" and poured a generous helping of boric acid into a little glass dish. Synchronicity. I set it out on the shelf next to the towels and then showered.

Just before I left for the day, I reached inside the closet one more time, grabbed the edge of the pink towel, shook it like a wet dog, and as the ants went flying, I took off a-runnin'.

I hope the ants enjoy their dish full of poison. I hope it works.

To be continued.