Dave, Karen, and I ate lunch at Cha Cha Cha on Sunday. Cha Cha Cha is a Mexican café in Westmoreland, just around the corner from Caprial's. While we ate, we watched a comical scene.
A well-dressed young woman parked her car at the curb. She got out of the car and opened the trunk, from which she began to withdraw large, blockish hunks. These she assembled into a perambulator, a baby carriage. It was a lovely thing — powder blue and iron (or so it looked) — very old fashioned.
"That probably cost a fortune," I said.
"It's probably some sort of antique," said Dave.
After several minutes of assembly, the buggy was ready. The woman placed a pillow and a baby blanket inside. She blocked the wheels, and then she got two-month-old (?) Junior from his car seat. More fussing followed as she tried to make him as comfortable as possible.
"Watch," said Karen. "They're just going down to the corner for Starbucks." We laughed. How funny it would be if this woman had spent the past seven or eight minutes fumbling with her perambulator for only a thirty second walk to the coffee house.
We were shocked at what actually occurred. She didn't wheel the kid the half-block to the Starbucks. No, she wheeled him a quarter block to the Italian restaurant! She spent seven or eight minutes prepping the baby buggy for a trip of one hundred feet, and then when she reached the door, she pulled the baby out and carried him in!
What the hell? And what did she then do with the perambulator inside the restaurant?
The ants have continued to make reconnaissance forays into the house. They find the bathroom particularly intriguing. They enter the bathroom by crawling up the inside of the shower enclosure and entering through a small hole high up on the sheetrock. Then they spread out, scouring the room for who knows what.
This, of course, drives Kris nuts. We hate those little motherfuckers. On Friday afternoon, she put out a bit of boric acid for them. The idea is that they carry this stuff back to their nest, annihilating the tribe. The problem was, the boric acid dripped down the inside of the shower enclosure. The ants thought this was great fun. They came in droves to consume the stuff.
Kris couldn't tolerate it. Rather than exercise patience, allowing as many ants as possible to carry the stuff back to their nest, she got out the bug spray and blew the fuckers away. There was a sticky black streak down the side of the shower comprising ants and poison.
This, of course, created difficulties because I hate the smell of insecticide, yet I wanted to take a bath. Kris wouldn't clean up the mess until the next morning when she showered. When I bathed later in the day, I watched in amazement as the occasional ant scurried down the wall and then, when it happened upon a patch of moist poison, fell — dead — to the rim of the tub. A half dozen ants died instant deaths while I watched.
While Dave and I were driving around on Sunday, a dazed honey bee alighted upon the windshield. It rested there, thorax throbbing, as we drove back to Dave's house.
What happens to that honey bee now, I wonder. Can it find it's way back across the three or four miles to its home? Can it find another hive to join? If it does find another hive, will the strangers accept it, or will it be an outcast? Enslaved? Killed on the spot? Will it band together with other displaced honey bees to form a new hive? Will they take out an advertisement, recruiting a queen? Seriously, what happens to a honey bee when it suddenly finds itself far, far from home?
When Dave and Karen moved into their house, a Vietnamese family lived next door. The family moved out last fall to free space for extended family members arriving from Vietnam. Those family members never came. The house has been sitting empty for months. Then, last month, the owner got his water bill from the city of Portland: $1200! The city agreed to waive the fee (since it's so obviously wrong, I guess), but the owner has to find out where the problem is: has a pipe burst? Is there a leak? (You'd think that $1200 worth of water would be rather noticeable.) There are no visible problems with the house, so the man has borrowed a backhoe and has been digging large trenches through his yard, searching for the problem. He hasn't been able to find it. What he was able to find is a buried oil drum, which he had to have removed, of course. The whole scenario sounds like an absolute nightmare. I'll bet Dave has been siphoning water to cool his fancy-schmancy (but hot) home-made "computer in an old-time console radio case".
On this day at foldedspace.org
2003 — Master and Commander Why is it sea-stories compel me? The Mutiny on the Bounty, Moby Dick, and now Master and Commander: I love these tales of adventure, find myself entranced by the romance of life at sea.
I think that if the bee did not find it's way back to it's hive and decided to try another hive it would probably be killed. Apparently they have "hive odors" which allows the bees to ascertain which hive the bee is from, let in hive citizens and kill off non citizens. Check here
As for the ants, you know what to do, you just don't want to do it. A) Wipe out their trails with chorinated water (they use a pheremone to lay down their trail), but not before noting how they get into the house. Then, B) put out prodigious quantites of highly poisonous bait for them to take back to the nest. If that doesn't work, get a different exterminator and start over.