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.]]>