From Naughty Vegetables to Dirty Tricks

I already shared about the scandalous vegetables to be found at the CollegeTown farmer's market. Today, I bring you a quick post to show you the further shocking things to be found when you commit to local eating: dead presidents.


That's right, folks. Richard Nixon, jowls and all, is alive and well and living in CollegeTown. Or at least he was until I baked him into a delicious eggplant parmesan.

Buggin' out

If you're a long-time follower of this blog, you may remember the time we had the termites. It was a dark time, and up to that point, it was pretty much my most traumatic bug encounter. And, really, it still is. There's nothing quite as traumatizing as the combination of thousands of winged insects in your house with the thought of potentially thousands of dollars spent getting rid of them. (They were in a very limited area, so it ended up not being that expensive and was covered by the condo association, but we didn't know that when we were staring at them in horror.) Just because they're not traumatizing, though, doesn't mean I'm happy about our newest roomies here in CollegeTown: ants.

We actually first got the ants at the beginning of summer. At first it was just seeing several of them in various places in the house. We had heard, though, that ants were more plentiful than usual this year, and we just figured it was a coincidence. Then they got into our honey. And honestly, people, even at that point, we were upset, but we didn't want to kill them. What can I say; we're cheap-ass hippies. Ain't no way we're spending money on toxic chemicals. Anyway, ants don't spread disease or do any property damage. A friend suggested putting the honey jar in a bowl of water (a sort of honey moat), it seemed to work, so live and let live, right? Except. They were everywhere. Everywhere! Not in our food, mind you - we protected all the food and they couldn't get to it. But everywhere else. And it started to wear on us.

So I turned to my friend the Interweb, who suggested that we make a bait out of honey, water, and Borax. It wasn't supposed to work overnight (they have to take it back to the nest, which was in our walls, which is so gross), but it really didn't seem like it was working at all. Quite the contrary; it seemed like we were running an ant soup kitchen. But then, finally, after a couple of weeks, it did. They were gone. It was great.

Then, literally the same day that I thought to myself that perhaps we could take the honey out of its moat, there were more. These ants are smaller, and this was after a break of a few weeks, so we think it's a new colony. As I said, we started from a position of being willing to co-exist with the ants. Now, if I could put something in the bait to make the ants explode when they ate it, I totally would. And with each and every little explosion I would chuckle the maniacal chuckle of someone who has been pushed to the end of her rope.