Someone on Twitter was asking where the cicadas were and how quiet these long summer nights have been, and today, they’re loud enough for me to actually notice them.

And ants are back too. I saw a trail from the banana peelings I had left on the counter and followed it to the area where we have our tea and coffee stuff and sure enough, black ants had found their way into a partly open jar of white sugar.

So I placed the jar onto a deep plate with water in it and suddenly realised, what was the point of this really?? While it solves the problem of preventing more ants from going into the jar, what would you do with those already inside?? Would they be enticed perhaps to go out of the jar and be dumb enough not to notice the water and drown?

But this is a habit that I’ve been doing since I was a child. My mother was always equating wastefulness as a sort of sin so we were encouraged to be thrifty as much as we could. We cut toothpaste tubes in half so we could scrape the remainder inside. Leftover food was eaten two or three times until it was gone.

And as for jars with ants inside them? We had to scrape off as much of the ants inside that were on top and salvage the rest of the sugar.

I started to do this when I realised that we don’t really use white sugar. I haven’t even drunk real coke in over 15 years and use stevia for my coffee. We only had this sugar leftover for when I baked something (which I don’t do often).

So I took the jar off the plate and put it under the hot tap, washing out all the ants and the sugar inside.

Bye.