blog.erwintang.com

It’s been about 48 hours after I sealed off gaps underneath the sink in my bathroom. Outside of that one straggler ant that was probably trapped on the wrong side of the threshold, I have not seen any other ants since. I don’t want to jinx it and declare victory on that front just yet, but the signs are all looking good.

In the kitchen, results are a bit more mixed. There are still a fair number of ants under the sink and I can’t say these are the ones who were caught out after I sealed off the gaps. There are still a few gaps under the sink that need sealing. One gap I can seal off with the silicone sealer but the others are cutouts for pipes and wiring. These cutouts are huge and I need an foam expanding foam or perhaps tape to these areas off.

The kitchen is still a work in progress, so the battle continues.

Yesterday I cleaned out the areas where I was gonna apply the silicone sealant. The liquid ant bait was a sticky mess but it got removed fairly easily with a bit of isopropyl alcohol and hot water. Underneath the kitchen sink was a tougher area to clean since it had much more piping to work around.

Once the areas were dry and clean, I got to work. The sealant I purchased came in a tube because I didn’t want to buy caulking gun and also I was gonna need to get into some tight spaces where such a gun would have not fit. I cut the tip of the tube off and in hindsight, I probably should have cut more off to get a bigger bead.

I started off in the bathroom because it had more space to work with. Under that sink, I’ve seen the ants get through the gaps along the bottom but not really the vertical ones, so I just sealed off those. The sealant is not as viscous as I’d imagined it to be, so I had to apply lots of force to get it out. That led to the bead being of varying thickness along the gaps. Some of it doesn’t look pretty but I think it covers all the gaps.

After I did the bathroom, I got tired, my blood sugar starting dropping, so I ordered some fried chicken and poutine. After eating, I took a nap, and wanted to play video games, so I left the kitchen for the next day.

This afternoon, I went to seal up the gaps under the kitchen sink. The amount of piping under there made it a major pain in the ass to apply the sealant. It honestly looks terrible in some places and I can’t even be sure the sealant covers all the gaps. For the places I definitely know the ants were emerging from, I did seal those gaps over without any doubt.

I have also being checking out the bathroom area since it was all sealed off. In the last 24 hours, I’ve seen exactly one ant underneath the sink. From it’s behaviour, it appears to be an ant that had been already in the bathroom when I sealed it off. It keeps walking along the corners where a gap would have been. That’s the only ant I’ve witnessed so far and I hope to keep it that way.

It’s too early to tell how well the sealant will work in the kitchen. I’ll be monitoring that area with great interest as well. I can’t say this issue is fully resolved just yet but I hope I’ve made some huge strides this weekend.

This week I was downstairs going to my bank when I saw a lady and her very large dog. I’m not sure what breed it was but it was large, like approaching a small pony size. Despite its size, it’s didn’t seem scary or intimidating, it was just a big dog.

As I was walking towards the bank, I saw the lady and the dog approach the bottom of an escalator. The lady wanted her dog to go on the escalator with her but the dog, stopped walking and just looked at the moving steps with trepidation. She was quite patient though and she spoke to the dog with encouraging words. Still, the dog held firm and even let out a single bark to let her know he wasn’t really wanting to do this.

By this time, I had walked out of view of this spectacle and I soon entered the bank, amused at what I had just seen. It took me a few minutes to deposit my lemonade stand money. Once that was done, I walked out of the bank, to retrace my steps to get back home. I quickly saw the lady and her dog in the exact same place. The dog still had not mustered up the courage to go on the escalator and the lady was still trying to encourage it to give it a try.

I didn’t have time to witness the outcome of this because I had to get home to make some dinner. I wonder what did happen in the end.

Upon reflection, I totally understand the hesitation on the part of the dog. Every person needs to learn how to get on an escalator. As a kid, I remember it being tricky and I got really nervous the first few times. As humans, we only need to worry about getting our two feet coordinated enough to get on the escalator steps. A dog has to navigate four feet onto the escalator. Also, it’s extra complicated because each set of feet need to be on separate steps.

I hope the dog figured it out.

The silicone sealant arrived on my doorstep on Tuesday but I’ve been too lazy to even open the package, let alone apply it to all the gaps and cracks in my bathroom and kitchen.

Part of the reason I’ve been lazy is that I need to clean all the surfaces before applying the sealant. I’ve pour a ton of that sticky liquid bait in and near these cracks and gaps, and I need to clean all of that off before applying the sealant. The area needs to be dry as well, so it’s a process.

There’s another long weekend coming up, so I’ll do it in a few days.

I want everyone to know that last week I discovered three dead ants in the glass that I was drinking from. I have no idea how long those ants were in my glass before I saw them. Just before making that horrifying discovery, I had just topped up my glass from my electric kettle. So either the ants were already in my glass before or I had just poured dead ants into my glass from my kettle.

Neither option is really great. I cleaned out both my glass and the electric kettle but the stain of that memory is still with me. It was at that moment that my war with these ants became more personal and made angry for the first time. These fuckers need to die.

It’s been a few more days since I set my ant bait traps. As I noted in my last post, there seem to be fewer ants in the kitchen compared to the bathroom, though I found a damn ant on plate that I was using on the weekend. They must be getting up onto the counter somehow. Looking under the kitchen sink, some times I see no ants and other times I see like two or three. There are definitely more under the bathroom sink.

The ant bait traps are definitely not “set and forget”. The bait dries up into this semi-liquid and semi-solid state, like if you poured out maple syrup and then let it dry out. The ants definitely aren’t interested in it in this form, so I have to almost daily re-apply new bait, in liquid form, in areas where they congregate. Even, most of the ants don’t seem interested in the bait anymore. I put the bait right along their travel corridors and many of them just walk around it. I don’t know why that is. I’m wondering if I should coat another bait type in the liquid bait, something like a small piece of chicken or something.

I have also decided I need to seal off the gaps in the cabinetry under the sink. I can see the ants going in and out of these gaps. I ordered a few tubes of clear silicone sealant, which will arrive on Monday. Will that be enough to keep the ants out? The problem is, I’m not sure if I’ve discovered all the points of ingress into my apartment. At least I know sealing these gaps isn’t a bad idea, so we’ll go from there. I just wish the bait traps were more attractive to them.

So those new ant bait traps arrived on my doorstep yesterday. Each trap is basically clear plastic packaging that contains a sticky, thick clear liquid. Just look at it here.

The instructions tell you to break or snip off one end of the package and place it label side up on a surface where the ants will find it. In this configuration, the liquid stays inside the trap and the ants are supposed to then make their way into the trap via the hole at the end, feed, and then leave. I quickly discovered this was not gonna work for me.

The ants that are infesting my apartment are much smaller than the ants you might have seen outside on a sidewalk or something. I believe they are called pharaoh ants. These ants are tiny. The opening to the traps is elevated off the ground and are way too high for them to easily get into the opening. The second issue is that the liquid bait inside the trap isn’t attractive enough for them to smell it and then investigate. They just ignored it or couldn’t smell it.

Some of the reviews of this trap mentioned they had pour small drops of the liquid bait directly onto the surfaces where the ants might find them. I did this and I also discovered I had to pour the liquid right in the paths of where they would traverse. A drop even like 5mm away from their “highways” would not be touched or noticed. I also used a cotton-tip to apply the bait along a vertical crack in the cabinetry where I saw lots of ants coming and going.

I did this both under my kitchen and bathroom sink. Last evening, I had dozens and dozens of ants eating from the bait in both locations. My original thinking was that the kitchen sink had more ants but it was the bathroom that attracted more. Keep in mind, I taped off the most probably point of ingress in the kitchen, so this is most likely a sign, I’m closer to solving the problem in the kitchen.

Anyways, after a night of feeding, I went to check both areas this morning. In another good sign, all the ants had left and I saw no dead ants anywhere. This meant that the ants that fed had taken the bait back to wherever they have their home and I’m hoping they shared the deadly bait with others.

This evening, I haven’t seen a whole lot of ants in either location but I refreshed the bait areas anyways. This liquid stuff tends to harden a bit after 24 hours and the manufacturer recommends keeping the bait as liquid as possible.

I’ll check again later this evening to see if the ants come back to feed. My hope that the extermination process has started and the ants will start dying in another day or two.

Some high school student from France is using one of my email addresses with some sorta school administration system. I guess it’s the system where you can look at your grades and schedule.

How do I know this? Because I received at least four emails this morning each of which were password reset messages. I could have reset his password and then logged into his account but what purpose would that serve? I have no benefit from looking at some high school grades.

I hope he figured it out.

As some of you know, I am dealing with a minor ant infestation at my home. I have narrowed down their general points of entry as underneath my kitchen sink and my bathroom sink.

This weekend, I cleaned out the areas underneath of both those sinks to look for more specific points of ingress. I started with my kitchen sink. It was a good opportunity to give that area a good scrubbing and cleaning. It’s where I put my garbage receptacle, so it was due for a cleaning, even without the ant infestation.

During the cleaning, I was able to see ants popping into view from two places, where the cold and hot water pipes come up from the floor below. There are gaps in between the cabinet and the pipes and they were using them to get into my apartment.

The bathroom sink cleaning and examination was less conclusive. The water supply pipes come out of the back wall and I didn’t see any ants coming out from there. I also saw a lot fewer ants in this area compared to the kitchen. I couldn’t tell where they were coming from.

So the question was, what to do? On my way back from dinner with my parents, I stopped by Walmart and got these ant bait traps made by Raid. These traps don’t kill the ants immediately and let them bring back poison back to the nest, so they kill the ants you don’t see. I laid these traps down in both the kitchen and the bathroom, right near the ants. Unfortunately, they had no interest in them at all. I ordered a different bait trap on Amazon that seems to work better than the Raid one I bought today. It arrives on Tuesday.

In the meantime, I sealed off the gaps between the pipes underneath my kitchen sink. If this is indeed where they’re getting in, hopefully this means they won’t be doing that again. The issue is that means I’ve also trapped any ants that are currently in my apartment already.

I feel like I’ve made some progress in the kitchen area but I need the bait traps that actually work. I also still need to figure out where they’re making entry in my bathroom. If I get bait traps that work, that becomes less of an issue in the bathroom so we’ll see on Tuesday.

I’ve started cooking and washing dishes with an apron on now. It kinda makes sense because when you’re cooking, especially when frying, you get all sorts of splatter that goes everywhere, including your clothes. When washing dishes, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been soaked afterwards because a wayward spoon redirected the water up and out of the sink and onto my shirt.

For better or worse, I bought an apron off Amazon that was probably meant for cosplay, rather than the kitchen. If you’re familiar with an anime series called Way of the Househusband, you probably know the titular character wears an apron almost all the time. I got an apron exactly like his, down to the cartoon dog on the front. The problem is it’s sorta flimsy and thin. It’s thick enough to protect me from oil and sauce splatters but for dish washing, sometimes the volume of water coming out of the sink is enough to soak through the apron and still get on my clothes. It’s better than not wearing it though, so I can’t complain too much.

I’m a real chef now.