9 September 1999
The horror... The horror... Due to a close-proximity lightning strike, my office was isolated from the internet for about twenty-four hours, starting Tuesday evening. I couldn't get e-mail at all (because I use my office account for everything), I couldn't surf while I was at work, and no one could get in to my site. It only came back up last night thanks to a brave soul from our Springfield office who volunteered to make the three-hour drive down with the necessary pieces of hardware to fix the problem. (This is what happens when your service provider is three hours away - you do not get good repair service. This has been illustrated to our office on more than one occasion, and we hope fervently now that the situation will be rectified, by choosing a local provider, or at least a provider with a local office!)


I got home from work yesterday and went into the kitchen to make dinner (it being my turn to do so) and saw a couple of ants on the counter. I killed them quickly before they could bring friends. But it was too late - I saw a line of marching ants travelling all along the edge of the counter, down the bar, around the side of the bar, and out under the back door.

I hate ants.

Luckily for me, they hadn't found the food yet. So I got the bottle of Clorox out of the garage, and proceeded to wipe down my counter with it, indiscriminately slaughtering ants as I went. While I was doing this, my friend Richard called, and he reminded me that Windex works just as well to kill the ants and get rid of their scent-trail without having to worry about damaging the linoleum or my clothes. So I fetched the Windex from the closet, and that worked even better. Whoosh! and the whole swarm of them milling around the corner of the door collapsed instantly. Whoosh! and they stopped coming through. (I don't know whether it was because they'd lost the scent trail, or if ant corpses had plugged whatever hole was letting them in. I zipped along the baseboard, whoosh-ing as I went.

I then called an exterminator - the same one my parents use, since they've had good luck with them - and although the person in charge of Williamsburg had already left for the evening (it was almost 6 by that point) the person still there took my name and phone numbers and promised that I would get a call today. I've known since we moved in that we needed to contact an exterminator to set up a schedule of preventative treatments (it's much harder to get rid of an invasion in progress than to discourage one from starting) but I didn't think I'd need them this quickly.

Oh, well. Everyone I know is having ant problems right now, so I guess I shouldn't take it too personally. I suspect the heavy rain of the past week has washed out all the ant tunnels, and the rapidly fluctuating air pressure is driving them to seek controlled environments. I can understand that.

I just don't want it to be my environment!