In Which My Picnic is Ruined, or The Apartment Chronicles Continue

About ten minutes after moving into this apartment, I discovered that I had an insect problem – teeny-tiny ants started appearing in my bathtub, on the tile bathroom walls, in the folds of the shower curtain and, occasionally, on the toilet seat.

"Oh." I thought. "Well, never mind. They'll probably die soon, since there's obviously nothing to eat in the bathroom. And at least they're small and not cockroaches."

Ha. I should have known better. Not only do they not appear to be dying, but their tiny kingdom seems to be flourishing to the point of sending out colonies to the kitchen. What are they eating there in the bathroom? Lord only knows, although I observed last night while I was caulking (it went quite well, thank you) that they actually appear to live behind the tiles. Maybe they eat tile glue. Accordingly, I would like to know: can I re-grout over the crappy/sometimes nonexistent grout on my wall tile? It would seal off what I assume are the main entry points into their fortress.

So my penciled-in "plan lessons" in my daily planner was erased and replaced with "plan ant pogrom." I did as much squishing as I could, but I think I need chemicals to really do the job right. The most annoying thing is that their small size makes these ants very hard to effectively squish. I guess the exoskeleton-to-internal-organ ratio is particularly high. The second most annoying thing is that the market, where I know they sell insect-killing chemicals, is closed on Mondays. On the bright side, it only took about fifteen minutes to figure out where their colony is based (and accordingly, where the chemicals will go): in the disgusting, dust-clotted, apparently useless vent above the cupboards. (How many more disgusting things do I have to discover about this apartment before I'm done? I hope not very many.)

Ants, you've been warned: you have twenty-four hours left to live.