The Ants Go Marching 20 by 20 -- aaagh!!

We are in the middle of an ANT INVASION!! It began Sunday afternoon, but you might say it actually began much earlier than that. For some time now they have been sending out 'scouts', I guess, to decide whether or not it was worth the effort to invade. We killed most of the scouts, but I guess they decided they had a good strategy and that the risk of defeat was low. D-Day was Sunday, the landing was executed with perfect timing, and the unsuspecting family came home from church to find ourselves under siege.

The kitchen counters were covered, and the stove, and just about anything in sight that was not in some sort of closed container was being ravished by the Formicidae Hymenoptera forces. But they had underestimated the strength and cunning of the adversary. My mother, a skilled and experienced strategist herself, used her secret weapons of mass destruction, one called Sponge, which crushes and wipes away the invading forces, and one called Ant-B-Gone, which could come under the category of biological warfare, since it is sprayed into the air and kills the ants instantly on contact. With these weapons she soon won this battle, having sprayed, crushed, wiped, and swabbed all ants in sight.

The ants are not very smart, though. Most countries, if they are up against such a formidable foe, and their armies are wiped out by the hundreds by this foe in the very first battle, will at least withdraw and try on a different front, or even completely give up and mind their own business. But not ants. We've been killing nearly every scout they've sent out between Sunday and now, but this morning we were alerted to a new battle when I took down the sugar canister to sprinkle some on my breakfast grapefruit. The ants had developed a new strategy, one that was essentially composed of the idea 'out of sight, out of mind'. In other words, instead of being out in the open, they were inside a cupboard, swarming over it and the things in it. But, once again, they underestimated their opponent, and my mother and her secret weapons triumphed once again.