Here I Am, Patty Loveless)
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A few months ago, I asked y’all for veggie suggestions. I copied a few of the suggestions to a Word document, printed it out, and it sat on my desk until recently.
When Fred got groceries on Saturday, I had him get me a bunch of fresh asparagus. Yesterday with my lunch I had
roasted asparagus, and oh my GOD, it was SO DAMN GOOD, I could have eaten twice as much asparagus and nothing else, and been perfectly happy with that as my lunch.
I don’t remember who posted the roasted asparagus recipe in my comments, but whoever it was – thank you!!
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We had yet another visit from the exterminator yesterday. Last Wednesday I was sitting in the computer room and glanced over toward the window to find a line of ants coming from the corner of the room, along the baseboard and into the hallway. Fred called the exterminator, but seeing as it was the day before Thanksgiving and they take the Friday after Thanksgiving off (slackers!), they couldn’t get an exterminator out to us until Monday. So Fred told them I’d be here all day, and then discovered on Monday that I had to take Miz Poo to the vet. He called the exterminator again, who said she’d be in our area Tuesday and would come to the house sometime after 11.
So yesterday morning while I was waiting for the drivers from the local charity to come pick up all the crap in our garage, I opened my desk drawer to grab my list of phone numbers, only to find about thirty ants wandering around in there.
“Dudes, what the fuck?” I said. “There’s no FOOD in there, what are you so excited about?”
“Lady, we’re ANTS!” said the ringleader. “We wander about randomly in hopes that we’ll run across food, and when we find some, we get all excited and call all our friends!”
“But dude, I reiterate: there’s no FOOD in there.”
“Au contraire,” said the ringleader. “We found a SESAME SEED!” And all his cohorts did a conga line dance of excitement, kicking their little spindly legs and waving their antennae in the air like they just didn’t care. Or rather, cared a little too much.
“I wonder how excited you would be if I squished every last one of you fuckers?” I suggested.
“That wouldn’t be nice,” said the ringleader. Actually, he said “That wouldn’t be ni-” and could say nothing more, because I’d squished the life right out of his little body. And then his cohorts became alarmed and some of them reared back with their spindly little front legs in the air as if they could fight me off, and some of them just ran around in circled, trying to remember from whence they’d come, and after I squashed the fuck out of every one of the little fuckers, I went and got some ammonia and some paper towels and scrubbed out my desk drawer. Every now and then for the rest of the day, an errant ant would wander through my desk drawer only to be asphyxiated by the ammonia fumes.
Finally, they put up a skull-and-crossbones sign at the entrance to my desk drawer and no more ants have been spotted in that drawer since then.
Sometime after noon, the exterminator showed up. When I answered the door, she told me that she was going to spray outside around the foundation, and then she’d spray inside to kill the ants that were crawling around. I showed her where the fuckers were coming in, and she nodded wisely and went back outside to spray.
When she came inside to spray, she told me that she hadn’t seen any ants outside, which meant that they were coming in from under the house somewhere, and then she kind of shrugged, and I didn’t think to say “So if this spraying in the yard and the house doesn’t stop the fuckers, then what the hell do you do?”
I’m sure the answer is something along the lines of “Why, we charge you thousands upon thousands of dollars to use many loud machines to winch your house up off it’s foundation so we can spray under there, so that won’t work either!”
Anyway, she sprayed inside along the baseboards and told me that it wouldn’t kill the ants immediately, that they’d “take it back to their nest and it would kill them there”, and I’ve just gotta say that that sounds like a big pile of horseshit, because I’ve used granules and sprays and all sorts of shit that always claims that the ants will take the poison back to their nests, and IT NEVER FUCKING WORKS, so I think that this stuff was the exterminator’s way of placating me.
So she left, and I had to lure the ultra-nosy Sugarbutt and Tom Cullen into the garage so they’d stay away from the area where she’d sprayed until it dried (actually, I should say that I LOCKED them in the garage, but they didn’t care because they think the garage is the MOST fascinating place ever in this entire world), and I went off and roasted some asparagus for lunch.
I did see ants for the rest of the day, but as of this morning, there’s not an ant to be seen. Whether that’s because of the stuff she sprayed in the house or because it got really cold last night, I have no idea. I’m just glad the little fuckers are gone.
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“Well, I’ll be darned. They DO taste just like chicken!”
All of today’s uploaded pictures are
here.
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Previously
2004: I give it two weeks before someone barfs on the new comforter.
2003: No entry.
2002: No entry.
2001: “What will I do now that I don’t have to clean dust off my ball?”
2000: I’ll just not think about that.
1999: When she came to a stop, she sat up and swayed back and forth, blinking sleepily up at me.]]>
LOL Love the pictures of TC & SB. After seeing the first one I thought you would write something about brotherly love, scrolled down alittle and snickered at Toms expression then read the quotation and laughed my a$$ off!!! Cute!
Robyn,
I assume you have a crawl space under the house. The exterminator needs to go down there and spray in order to get rid of all the ants. You can usually access the crawl space from a trap door inside a closet somewhere. That’s the only way you will ever get rid of them. Learned this the hard way when we had carpenter ants a few years back. I’m still surprised our house didn’t come down around our ears, since there were piles of chewed up wood under the house.
I make asparagus almost like that, but I put the parmesean on right after coating in oil/salt/pepper, and before putting it in the oven at 450 for 12-15 minutes. It makes a nice crust and while I don’t really like asparagus at all, my girlfriend loooooooooooooves it and it disappears pretty quick.
Ants! Whew, we had an ant attack several years ago, living in the city. And the little monsters would get into my cats’ food — one way or another. When we finally called an exterminator, he looked around outside the house for some time, then told me the primary culprit seemed to be ants coming from a huge old tree — in a neighbor’s yard! It was some distance to cover, but when he pointed out their trail (which zigzagged and wasn’t easy to detect) I realized he was correct. He put bait near the base of the tree (with neighbor’s consent) and then put bait at several places around the outside of the house, as well as spraying inside/outside. It did take several days for the ants to carry bait back to their headquarters!, but sure enough that stopped the problem. Unfortunately we had to sign a YEAR contract with the pest control, but only needed it a couple months. So it goes…
Renate: Actually, no, our house is on a slab.
Desi: Ooh, I’ll have to try that! 🙂
Our ant horror story: My husband sprayed some really powerful stuff around our house to stop the ants, and under the house, too. Ya know what happened next? The spray drove the ants INSIDE. They went crazy in our cabinets (where they’d never been) and got into everything in there that they could, in boxes of cooking stuff that hadn’t been opened, under the peanut butter jar lids. They had quite an art feast in there, they were in the silverware drawers, towel drawers (no food there, didn’t matter to the little fucks). We had to take EVERYTHING out of our cabinets, wash everything, spray INSIDE the house, clean inside the cabinets, throw most of the perishables out… Now we spray inside FIRST, wait a day, then spray OUTSIDE AND UNDER. I HATE ANTS!
hello robyn,
my ant story goes like this: we saw ants in our family room, our bathroom (definetly NEVER any food there !!!!!) and tried to kill them, had them ‘treated’ and finally the answer was they weren’t really ants… they were worker termites…. a year later the termites were recognizable as termites even to me…. so we had to have bait stations just for termites put in and the place sprayed with totally different stuff…..
good luck they are a big pain…
That chicken comment made me laugh so hard! Classic.
Re Ants – the first 3 summers we lived in this house I had ants in the walk-in pantry several times each summer. So many ants the shelves were black with them. It was a huge stinky messy job cleaning them all out after spraying. Since then the ants have just decided not to push their luck round here. Except in the garden and nothing seems to get rid of them there.
And, by the way, if you ever get a squillion ants in the dishwasher do not run the washer thru a hot cycle to get rid of them. The smell is absolutely horrendous. And even then you still get little black legs on your crockery for ages. Yuck.
I hope you don’t have to pay the exterminator every time she comes – she should give you a guarantee period, something like 3 months. I had an exterminator in to get rid of the fleas in the apartment, and he gave me a 3-month guarantee.
I would suggest using Raid, but that’s not too good for your pets…
Niki: That’s Mister Boogers, not Tom Cullen. 🙂
Amanda: Yeah, we’re on a plan where we pay quarterly, and she comes out as many times as we need her to. Which – knock wood! – I hope won’t be again anytime soon! 🙂
I use oil, salt, pepper, and minced fresh garlic on my asparagus. I put it in a 500 degree oven for about 10 minutes. YUM! That’s the only way I can eat it. The canned stuff is slimy and horrible.
Did ya try my idea of leaving some food outside for the ants??
My Jehovah Witness friend(They take the thou shall not kill vow seriously)says it works like a charm.
I put the ant bait outside and it worked well-didn’t tell her I killed those precious creatures though.
Last night we had Roasted Brussel Sprouts and oh man they don’t taste anything like steamed ones. They’re like candy! My husband and I fought over them even. I was so surprised to see you mention the Roasted Asparagus. I cut the brussel sprouts in half, then threw them in a bag with olive oil, sea salt and pepper. Then layered them on a pan and roasted them at 400 degrees for 30 minutes. So easy. I’ve seen a recipe for green beans done this way too. Probably most veggies would be good.
I love any veggie roasted in olive oil and garlic! Must try the asparagus though, sounds yummy..
Karin: EWWWWWWWW!!! Did I mention… EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!??