Have You Eaten a Cockroach Today?

I did. Well, it wasn't a cockroach, but an ant. Every spring I get this hugely annoying invasion of ants. I hate waking up to find one crawling on me. I sit at my desk and they race across my keyboard or up my arm. I lean down to pick up a shoe and one falls out of my hair. I go to dry my face with a towel and find an ant staring insolently at me.

Well, I've been working at my desk all day, nursing my daily cup of coffee. Just one cup. No more. I can sip on a cup all day. So I reached over and took a couple swallows from the dregs of the mug, and something bumped my lip. I looked down. There's a drowned ant on the rim. A very disgusting drowned ant that looks like he's been there a long time.

I am NOT amused. I have little ant bait stations all over the house and they ignore them. They're supposed to eat from them, then go back to their nest and tell their buddies, who also eat from the bait station. Each time they return to the nest, they infect the nest with the bait. The theory is that eventually the whole nest gets poisoned from the bait and dies.

So far, the ants are winning. I even Googled ants, to find other methods of eradicating them. One popular and totally useless piece of advice on all the sites is to follow the ant to its nest. HAVE YOU EVER TRIED TO FOLLOW AN ANT??? I spent 20 minutes hovering discreetly in the background, following an ant that rambled all over my kitchen counter, then the floor, then here and there, but never to its nest. So I picked another ant and followed it. After 15 minutes, I got tired of going nowhere.

We won't even talk about the rats that are eating me out of provisions in the barn. They go through rat poison like it was candy, and when I replace the little empty trays of poison with new stuff, they can't wait to get into it. I tell you, it's downright scary. I think they must be a strain of uber rat. I fully expect them to be waiting at the barn door one day, hands on hips, tapping their feet impatiently, chastising me for letting the bait stations go empty.

What about you? Have you ever inadvertently eaten a bug? What did it taste like? I accidentally ate a ladybug once. It tasted like green grass.