The Dyson, a Formidable Opponent to My Previous Archenemy, Cat Hair, Is the Archangel of Death to My New Nemesis, Ants

I generally coexist with the animals in my apartment. Cats? Aside from the general mass of poop they produce, sweet! Spiders? I may occasionally sweep aside a web once it is the size of my head but other than that, have at it!

Ants? I have tried to let them have their limited space for weeks now but after this rainy weekend and having to spend an hour of my cooking time banishing them from the kitchen so that I could present a sanitarily prepared cauliflower and leek kugel (for the Jews, of which there turned out to be none, but, a hit!) and some herbed bacon stuffing (for the Gentiles, meh, pic above) for a party I was attending Saturday night, I had had enough.

So I Dyson’ed them all up! Plus sprayed the crap out of them with all-purpose cleaner. PLUS got some Combat traps that I am guarding with my life to make sure Fred & Ethel don’t turn them into play toys (for the sake of their lives, not the sake of the ants’ death).

Actually, this ant frustration took me back to the last time I was so frustrated with insects I cried — New York. I had just moved there after graduating college, January 5, 1998, 21 years and 2 days old, and I didn’t know one person there. Or have a job. So I stayed in a residence hotel that Katie and I had scouted on a Thanksgiving trip when we were living in DC my last semester of college. ONLY. I had no idea that residence hotel meant “place where mid-class hookers and drug dealers stay and also where there will be bugs that POUR (I am not exaggerating) from the showerhead and also lice in your pillow and when you move into your new room on 106th and Columbus with the nice Westchester-bred 6th-grade history teacher who’s writing her PhD thesis on pre-civil war Southern agricultural economies (who took a chance on you even though you didn’t yet have a job yet) you will have to surreptitiously bug bomb your room on Friday nights when she’s out and shower with anti-lice shampoo for three months until whatever these God-forsaken creatures are have finally gone!”

That was a long way to say “ants sucks.”

Aside from the ants, I had a wonderful weekend in which I:

1. Nourished people with the kugel (again, less so the Gentile dressing).
2. Won a Mrs. Santa Claus velvet with white feather trim “negligee” (I am not sure why I am putting this in quotes except that that word is so uncomfortable for me to write (I turned a color I like to call “tomato” when I opened it) the quotes make me feel better) from the white elephant exchange, and plagued someone else with an evil-eye protector kit I bought from Cauldron Kitty, a place I tried to exit as quickly as possible so that I would not smother from the sage burning.
3. Attended a Channukah brunch and had the first jelly-filled donut I have ever enjoyed.
4. Received the first of the presents I have ordered online for my loved ones, which arrived with no less than four (4!) (p.s. if you are also a lawyer, don’t you wish you could put an exclamation point after every parenthetical number in a document? And elsewhere? Seller has thirty (30!) days in which to deliver the estoppel certificate or this Agreement will automatically (!) terminate (!) and Buyer will have no further obligations hereunder, subject to the survival provisions of Section 7.2, 8.6, and 11.1, 11.2, 11.6 and 1.7 of this Agreement! Boo-yah!) “fragile” markings, which immediately transported me to my 7th favorite Christmas movie ever, Christmas Story.

And now I have 11 days to figure out the rest of my Christmas presents and bring the reign of the ants to an end. I can do it! I have the Dyson and mind power, Swede, mind power.