Science and nature, ugh.

I am not a nature person by choice. I enjoy the outdoors, but I'd prefer it to come with critters that are out of sight so they are out of my mind. I don't enjoy toiling outdoors unless it is in a body of water. I don't feel the need to get my hands in the soil to create food or beauty. I enjoy walking in nature, taking pictures, admiring its beauty, and then I like to come back inside.

Now that spring is rapidly disappearing in Florida, I have noticed the tremendous amount of fire ant hills everywhere I travel. When I park my car, or move one of the many cars we have in what looks like a used car lot, I climb out and have to dodge ant hills. They are off the edge of my driveway which is rapidly becoming a suburban neighborhood with all of the houses these ants are constructing. Used to be my next door neighbor, Howard, would take care of that. He would see the hills, sprinkle some magic fairy dust on it and the hills would disappear. My kind of man. See nature near Cara, take care of it. Unfortunately, Howard has left me and moved to Texas where I'm sure he is taking care of ant hills for others, and my new neighbors are well, let's not get into all of my new, non-neighborly neighbors.

Before I go any further into this story, let me explain about fire ants. Fire ants are miserable little critters that will literally sting the crap out of any part of your body if you happen to disturb them in any way, accidentally or on purpose. Fire ant stings are never done by just one worker, because these little turds work together as a team, stinging your skin until you literally feel you have stepped into a giant fire pit. These ants are a southern thing, and the first time I was introduced to them was working my first picnic in the recreation department at my new job. The pool was rented out to organizations who had picnics outside in our shelter area, and when the event was over it was our job to clean up. Which was one of the many duties we did as lifeguards. Side note: we once made signs that we wore that said, "We pull weeds, we empty trash, we scrub toilets, we save lives." Our boss did not find it funny, and made us trash them, but we truly thought about making shirts with that slogan.

I was with another lifeguard my first week outside emptying trash cans and getting to know him when he looked down at me standing in the field outside the gate to the pool, and told me I was standing in an ant hill. To this day, I can remember my cocky attitude. I mean, what? Ants? We had ants in Indiana, who cared if I was standing on a hill? No sooner, had I gotten all of that out of my mouth, those little suckers stung. I thought I had been hit with a cattle prod. I started screaming, swatting my ankles, and when none of that worked I ran away and jumped into the pool with my clothes and shoes on. He has never let me forget that. In fact, he jumped in with me as a show of solidarity, and we have been friends since then, but at the time, it wasn't funny. These stings cause red whelps on the skin that eventually come to a white head full of pus. They are nasty.

So, suddenly we are being infested with a large amount of fire ants. Every day I have to hop over them getting in and out of our cars, and while they usually avoid a direct pathway a nest of these critters have decided they want to live away from the driveway suburbia. They started building a condo smack dab in the middle of the walkway to my front door. While I'm not usually a critter killer, save for spiders, roaches, and well, maybe I am a killer, I used my shoe and chucked the sandy dirt off my walkway, screaming at them to find another town.

The next morning they were back at it. IN THE VERY SAME SPOT. I got rid of it again. They went back at it. Tom got rid of it. They came back. By this time, I figured they were damn determined, and rewarding that tenacity, I ignored them and let them build. Only they decided to build a two story condo and invite their relatives from all over. That has not set well with me.

This hill was once the size of a nickel, and now is three times that. This is now war. I can't take it. I mentioned it to someone who jumped over the hill coming up my walk, and he told me that I could use Borax on the hill. That seemed more humane then some kind of spray, and so I Googled it. I watched a nice man on a YouTube video assure me that these fire ants are dangerous, not only to my yard and garden, but also to pets and well, my life, seeing as how a poor woman was just stung to death by fire ants. Okay, he might not have mentioned that death, but I read about it. I am to combine one cup of Borax and one cup of sugar in a jar and sprinkle "gently" over the condo mound. The YouTube man told me the sugar was for the queen who apparently is, what, resistant to Borax? I didn't really get that part of it, but I'm a direction follower to a T so I shall be adding the sugar. As soon as I get the Borax, which I thought we had for use in our pool, but found that we don't. I added it to my list.

Then, that night as Tom and I took the dog out for a walk, Tom swiped the condo mound with his foot and destroyed their home and my blog entry experiment. But don't worry. They will be back. They always are.