Dear Reader,
As the temperature rose the ants invaded... It sounds like opening line of a horror or post-apocolyptic novel, doesn't it? It's also what happened at my place this week.
As the temperature here in Florida closed on a hundred degrees, the little buggers (pun very much intended) came up though a knot in the floorboards. They then set up camp in the cats automated feeder.
I made this delightful discovery when I noticed the food bowl seemed unusually full. Raven is the kind of athletic, skinny-looking cat who you would believe could skip a meal or six. But Mystic is part Maine Coon and weighs around sixteen pounds after she's been put on a
diet. Seeing her food bowl even part full is unusual.
But when I peered closer I realized the food was
moving.
😱 😱 😱 Insert screams, horror, and the
kind of curses that would make a seasoned sailor blush. 😱 😱 😱
To cut a looong, high-volume, and even higher-pitched story short: that feeder is now gone. The ants had invaded its innards. Literally thousands of them. They were crawling through its wires and gears and my housemate, Ms Melinda, and I made the executive decision it had to go.
Neither of us are live-and-let-live people when it comes to bugs. She's had several traumatic insect experiences and I'm from Australia, the killer creepy-crawly capital of the world.
Maybe we could have cleaned it out but we would never have felt safe again.
And once home base had been heaved out, we handled the rest of our insect invaders with extreme prejudice. (Blows smoke away from her can of Raid, holsters it, and stalks off into the sunset.)
So in the meantime the cats are enjoying a canned food renaissance while we wait for the next feeder to
arrive.
