I don’t have much to complain about living here in SoCal. The weather’s great. The people are so nice. No earthquakes… yet. Not too hard to find joy.

And then there are the ants.

We have an issue with ants. And these aren’t just pesky ants, these are pesky, bite-y, ants. They get into everything… sweet stuff, savory stuff, even chemical stuff (i.e. stuff in the laundry area.) If it’s edible, they are into it. So we’ve become even more fastidiously clean… swiffering the floors after every meal, keeping dry goods in air tight containers, sweet treats reside under glass, and Mrs. Meyers is used liberally.

I would love to say that it helps. It doesn’t.

This past weekend, I pulled out my iron for the first time in a few weeks. Filled up the reservoir and turned the iron on. I pick it up, ready to begin ironing and what’s this I see? Ants. In the reservoir of my iron. Doing the backstroke.

Seriously. There were ants IN MY IRON.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take a certain level of glee with steaming the ants that happened to traipse along my ironing board. But after a while, it just got irritating. Irritating because the ones that I would miss would inevitably end up crawling on me as I was ironing. As time went on, I found myself getting angrier and angrier. At the ants marching along the walls of our laundry area. At our landlord for being so laissez-faire about the whole thing (his solution? Put out more ant traps.) At my husband for not seeing what the big deal was.

I was able to put stuff it away… until today.

This afternoon, I opened the microwave to heat up an afternoon snack and found…

A Colony of Ants in the Microwave.

Turns out someone didn’t clean up a splatter from the night before and the ants found the remnants. So, instead of enjoying my tasty snack, I was on ant clean up. By the time I finished, I was so not ready for a snack as the image of ants carousing around in the microwave was seared onto my retinas. If you hadn’t guessed… that’s a great way to kill an appetite. I was not happy about it, of course, but looking back… there is joy to be found.

Joy in that my kitchen is usually clinically clean.

Joy in that I have the time and desire to actually iron… and I remember now that I actually like to iron.

Joy in that I will have a better chance of not gaining too much weight while preggo by skipping random snacks.

I still hate the ants.

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