Used to Be

Used to be, we'd go to the Becker's Milk and play some type of video game to while away time and pocket money. I sucked at every game there was. Pac Man, Asteroids, whatever. No patience. All thumbs.

On Saturday I went to a friend's for some type of x-box gathering. In the last 20-odd years my touch has not improved.

We were playing a game called "Halo" or some variant thereof. For those of you who are (as I was recently) unaware of what this game involves please allow me to explain. This is a split-screen multi player game. Each character is heavily armed and goes around finding new weapons with which to kill my character which exists for two reasons. The first is to find new weapons which I cannot aim and fire and the second is to die frequently and horribly. I'm pretty sure they will have me back.

Outside of the tv set, things are good. As Mo has displayed, we have a new kitchen. I love that it's done. Done on budget, done on time. I like to cook in it too, with Mo, or with the kids around insofar as grating carrots can be considered cooking. The room is warm and light and one day we will have paid for it which will be nice provided we still have teeth to chew the food that we prepare in it, presuming of course there is food which we can purchase or grow if we aren't all underwater, or inundated with isotopes or free radicals, and bald and even our gums are too weak to dent food of which we haven't any on account of the isotope-enhanced weevils, or crickets, or triffids who have taken everything that matters away from us like food and even the Olson twins and reality television! So prepare canned goods now.

What I am saying is, our garden is doing well. Right now it is a vivid splash of green things which are growing impressively and the black dirt which is their medium. Like that Arquette girl. I like her. I also care so deeply about the environment, I bought 150' of soaker hose, so I can avoid evaporation, and the hose is made out of recycled Smurf figurines so the kids, as I can see, really enjoy the garden. So do the bees. And Gargamel.

We have many lavender plants, held over from the previous owners, which are presently a riot of purple, you could even call them lavender, blooms which are open for business. We are visited frequently by bees, many many bees, and they make a lot of noise. They are the reason our children cannot sleep during the summer. Cut down your plants, people, and pave, pave, pave!

Something else that likes to come to our kitchen: ants. Little black ants. One morning last week I came down with boyo and while I filled the kettle he cried: bugs! and there they were, in 4 separate lines, marching across the floor, hundreds, or at least tens, of them, marching through my kitchen and up the cabinets and around my dishwasher & c.

Permit me to pause here and state that I detest bugs. I know they are part of the wonderful and amazing circle of life which includes puffins, sea anemones, and Sandra Bullock but I want them all to die. I suspect this all goes back to a short story I was made to read in high school. There's a guy with a ranch somewhere in South America, and the ranch is being overrun by a powerful and fierce species of ants (like in this movie*, but without the manymanymany layers of unwholesome aerosol cheese) and all he has worked for is being consumed by these ants so off he runs and nothing will stop these ants, not even run-on sentences, until he reaches a river and then I think he does something with gasoline and a match and the end. So, I hate ants.

I looked up ants on the intertubes. Our visitors are likely little black pavement ants.** Thank goodness they are not fire ants, or the dreaded crazy yellow ants (thanks, Wikipedia). You cannot wipe out all of the ants, and only rarely can you destroy their colony, it says, but you can use borax and maybe wipe out a few cells... so don't bother, flesh creature, the ants are taking over! Nowhere in my research did I see "squishing" offered as a method of ant control. Nor "squishing ants with your thumb and leaving a mound of the dead near the door to your house through which you think the ants have entered as an unsubtle message to the ants who follow". If that was a game on on x-box I would kick ass.

Maybe I should find a hobby instead.

p-man

* The finest precis and movie review I will ever read.

** The amazing thing about these tiny black ants is they have a remarkably high moisture content.