Ants are in my pants. Literally.

Ants.

I've really grown to loathe and despise the little buggers.

Ants are a common problem in any home; I've squashed them all over the place, most especially when I lived in San Diego and D.C. But the ants that lived in those fine places came during predictable seasons (spring and summer), they hunted in predictable places (the kitchen) and died in predictable ways (Raid, ant traps, etc.).

Not so for the ants of Hawaii.

David warned me, insisted even, that the ants of Hawaii were a particularly cunning creature, able to find a single speck of food from miles away. And it's true. They come pouring out of the electrical sockets and through the windows and who knows what other crevices and pounce upon anything resembling food or water. They especially love water.

I could handle the ants that invaded the kitchen. I knew where to find them...I knew how to kill them. But then they started showing up in other places.

I've found them eating the soap bubbles in our bathtub or licking water straight from the shower head. I've caught them crawling across the living room floor (in search of what I don't know) or strolling across my laptop (!!!). I've spotted the ingenious bastards climbing up the cord of the iron to get to our tomato plants on top of the ironing board or taking picnics on our dining table. Last week they reached a new frontier. Our closet.

There was a whole line of them, crawling up into my drawers, poking their noses into my purses and climbing past my pants. That was the final straw. So we cleared everything out and we sprayed and we sprayed and we wiped every inch clean.

But I swear the ants of Hawaii are bionic ants. Even after using the toughest at-home ant killer we could find, the ants did not die.

In fact, I think it only made them stronger. And more determined.

So, no matter how much we spray and kill and wipe the ants away, 100 more just keep coming in their place, in the most random times, in the most bizarre places and there's nothing we can do to stop. You'd think with all the geckos [who supposedly eat ants] we have living in our air conditioning unit that we'd have a built-in ant trap but I'm beginning to think that our family of geckos are vegetarians.

The moral of the story is this: You might be one of those people who lives in a cold location, where it drops below 65 degrees and *grasp* possibly even snows. And if, when you're cold and shivering in your layers of clothes, you think to yourself that you'd love to be in some tropical paradise like Hawaii, basking in the hot, humid, muggy heat instead of slowly freezing to death from the inside out, just remember the ants.

And be happy that you're not fighting a loosing battle against bionic Hawaiian ants.

I swear they're out to get us.