A Friend in Need...

I'm thankful for a very specific incident today. 

As I mentioned in my "coping" post yesterday, my couch was beset upon by ants. Fire ants, as it turns out.

Just one of my ant bites.

I didn't see any ants for the rest of the day after that initial incident, so I woke up this morning hoping that it was over for good.

Then, I went in my kitchen and saw my counter was covered. The reassuring part of all this, of course, being that at least it made sense for the ants to be in the kitchen. I still have no idea why they were all over my couch yesterday.

Anyway, my plans to go to the gym were immediately cancelled. I killed the ants I could see, got Evie to school, then contacted the real estate place that handles our rental issues to let them know that my home was under attack.

I was seriously about to cry.

Then, an angel showed up.

The ants' entrance into my house.

My best friend, Juleigh, came to my rescue. In spite of feeling sick that morning, she selflessly showed up at my door and got to work helping me solve the problem.

In the past, because we keep so many appliances and things on our counters, I've taken the easy way out and just killed whatever ants were easy to find, and set (largely ineffective) traps for the rest. I usually only have to battle ants once a year, in the summer. But this was a new, and more annoying version of the ant problem. Juleigh suggested that we clear everything off the counters, and scrub everything with bleach.

As we did this, we discovered that my toaster oven had been hiding a large gap in the corner of my counter top from view. Whoever had put in the counter had not done a great job sealing up all the cracks. And, as we watched, we saw the ants coming out of the hole.

After three summer of fighting sugar ants, and never being able to tell how they were getting in, the mystery was finally solved!

We finished cleaning the kitchen - and boy, does Juleigh know how to make a kitchen sparkle! - then mopped the floors.

At some point in the process, the manager from our rental place came to look at the ants. Obviously, we had been killing them and wiping them away, so he didn't have much to look at. He said, though, that they could only help with the cost of the pest control if they were wood ants, and therefore tearing up the house. This being Texas, land of many bugs, anything else was going to be on me.

He was very nice about it. He recommended a good spray to use every few months around our baseboards and the outside of our house to keep the bugs away. And he recommended that we trim back the flower beds that had ivy creeping up the outside walls of our house.

With that information in hand, Juleigh and I went to Lowe's and got the pesticide spray, as well as some clear caulk to seal up all the cracks in my counter that were letting the ants in.

See? Wonder Woman.

We also caught a few ants, including a corpse of one of the bigger, biting ones, so we could make sure they weren't actually wood ants. Juleigh caught the ants using a piece of paper and dumped them in a jar so we could look at them more closely. As it turns out, the bigger ones were not wood ants. They were fire ants. Ugh.

It may seem like a little thing, catching those bugs, but I wouldn't want to do it. Juleigh is pretty much Wonder Woman.

Then Juleigh talked to her husband, Bryce, and worked out a time for him to come by later in the day and take care of the spraying and caulking. Sure enough, he came by after work and sprayed the pesticide on my baseboards and around the outside of my house. Then he caulked all of the gaps and cracks in my counter, which basically meant everywhere the counter was supposed to be touching the wall (but wasn't). He even caulked the kitchen window from outside the house, because he noticed a crack that I never knew was there.

SuperBryce's alter ego, mild-mannered Bryce

It took him about an hour to do it all, while I helplessly stood by and watched. When I told him that I owed him one, he said, "No way. We're always even."

What a guy! No wonder Wonder Woman married him! He's like Superman!

So basically, Superman (SuperBryce?) and Wonder Woman (Wonder Juleigh?) came to my rescue today. I was on the verge of throwing up my hands, giving up, and staying in bed for a few days, but they pulled me back from the edge of extreme frustration and helped me deal with a very annoying situation.

I'm so thankful for their selfless service to me today. They seriously made my whole day so much better than it would have been without them. I would probably still be battling those ants, with no idea how to fix the problem, if it weren't for them.

Wow, I sound seriously helpless. But then, I guess I am fairly pathetic when it comes to this stuff.

SuperBryce and Wonder Juleigh, you guys are my heroes! And I'm so grateful for what you did for me today! Thank you thank you thank you!

My clean, caulked, ant-free kitchen counters!