twilight33 | Ants & Aunts (Reply)

Shortly after I got the best news ever in my working career, I also got a panicked call from my husband saying an upstairs window was completely overrun with ants. They were mostly little tiny babies, some medium sized with wings, and about 10% were these huge suckers with wings. He was vacuuming them off as fast as possible, but more kept coming in through the closed sill. I brainstormed out loud and we ended up with battle lines of crushed red chili pepper liberally sprinkled everywhere around the window.

After the initial onslaught of over 500 or so were annihilated, the pepper seemed to work fairly well with just a few random stragglers to be squished. Neither of us slept well because we kept thinking about them crawling around. We are completely mystified as to how this happened as we hadn't seen so much as a single ant inside the house in over 5 years before yesterday.

About 30 popped up this afternoon though, something with the heat appears to be the trigger for them. I'm trying to stick with non-toxic ways to kill them off (for now) since Kieran's running around, not like we're letting him near the window full of ants & chili pepper anyway but still. Today I got the brilliant idea of getting my trusty Misto full of olive oil to spray around the windowsill with the chili pepper trails, and that worked very well for stopping the evil ones in their tracks as they managed to crawl through & coat their wings. This will be quite the mess to clean up later, but we'll live.

I have no idea how anyone had the patience to do genealogy before the internet. I have yet to pay for anything, but through a message board I expanded one branch of the family back to the 1500s & plugging in names from the backs of pictures my mom brought down last weekend expanded another one back to someone born in 1610. She & her sisters are fascinated that I'm being able to do so much online and want to know more about the family & share their stories as a result.

I talked with my other aunt (my dad's sister) last night and found out she didn't have or know about her great-grandmother's paintings. She was from Wales, born with the first two digits missing from either all or most of her fingers, and an artist anyway. One of the two paintings I have is going down to California to stay with my aunt when we visit her, and she can't wait to help me with my research. She's talked with a few of the older family members to get more information, and they are all excited that someone is finally documenting our family line. We're supposedly related to some Confederate general & have a connection to General Lee, my great-grand uncle (born in 1904) had Lee as a middle name and went by it more often than his first name.

A message board also led to my dad's second cousin finding me yesterday, he knows much less than I do about this branch of the family and was very excited to see a picture of his grandfather as a child & great-grandfather that I had posted last month. I can't wait until he reads the family journal, which was my main motivating factor for getting into all of this genealogy work a few months ago in the first place. I knew there had to be others out there who would want to read & learn these family stories, and now I'm finally starting to find them.

I still have a very long way to go in figuring out who all these people in Victorian, Edwardian & 1920s photographs are, and plenty of roadblocks about finding family members who should be blatantly obvious but aren't, but I'm getting there. If my own father wants to have nothing to do with me or the rest of the family that's his business; my goal is to find & get to know whoever is left before it's too late.