It's unfortunate that ants won't die if you just swear at them. After yesterday's scrubfest, I have airtight scientific proof of this fact. While ants will die if you spray them with orange-scented cleanser (is it the fact that it's a cleanser or that it's orangey that does the killing, I wonder?) and swear at them, swearing alone does not seem to do the trick.Ants are difficult to squish. They'd be easier to squish if I wasn't squeamish about squishing them with my bare fingers, but even the thought of that causes icky images of the ants making final heroic (to them) motions right before death - defiantly biting the finger that is just about to squish them to death.

So, a towel.

But you lose leverage with a towel. You usually just end up painfully compressing the ant instead of administering a killing blow. Meanwhile, you continue squishing, and somewhere under the towel you just know the ant is saying to itself, "Come on, you giant wanker, is that the best you've got?"

I am a squisher of ants. Even though the little crunching sound they make is vaguely disgusting.

(Yes, to a certain reader on the Eastern Seaboard, I know peace is the path, but they're in my kitchen. As far as I'm concerned, they declared war first!)

When I first encountered them, streaming up from by the stove, I immediately lost all semblance of adult wisdom and immediately reverted back to collegiate stopgap measures. In other words, knowledge gleaned from when we were all too broke to purchase all the cleaners and insect killers we needed, and just hoped that whatever spray bottle we grabbed first would hopefully do the trick.

Thus leading to my spraying the ants with orange cleanser and yelling encouraging profanities (and other charming phrases) at them.

When the ants' opening salvo ceased, I took the opportunity to begin scrubbing the cabinets down. The scrubbing of cabinets led to the restructuring of spice storage, and remembering that yes, the last time I was in Atlanta, I really did purchase small quantities of all four types of whole pepper (red, black, white, and green) and that they either needed to be separatedly bagged-and-tagged or combined into the lovely four-pepper combination I'd originally been planning on.

Ants lead to spice reorganization. Makes sense in my world, anyway.

But this morning, they were back, doing a happy hoedown to the right of the stove yet again. I grabbed the orange cleanser, wished them a happy February 29th, and sent them off to their great anthill in the sky.

Then Jeff showed me how to lift the cover off the stove. Every now and then I find out little things like this, that I was somehow unaware of. I had no idea you could actually lift the entire cover off of the stove. I always wondered how I was supposed to clean that area, but assumed it was one of those mysteries in life that would eventually be explained to me (like what day of the month it's actually convenient to go to the DMV office).

So our stove is currently propped up, toothless mouth gaping open in a dirty, unwashed smile. It's likely the source of our problem....which I'm ignoring by sitting in here at 1:43 in the afternoon, still in my glasses and my pajamas.

One of these years, that mythical maid is really going to show up. Really.