Infested

My parents are coming today! I was thinking yesterday that not many people my age would be this excited about their parents coming to visit, but I'm glad I'm one of them. I pick them up at five. This is another thing fueling my gladness: only three hours of work today! My back has been hurting a lot at work lately (it's that or my hand, depending on how I sit), so this will be good for me.

So I think I've mentioned we have ants. The traps we put out seem to be helping, but the occasional one still runs across the kitchen floor. Last night a particularly insolent one climbed up the counter and ran through my mail. I knocked it off the counter with a pencil (I would have squished it except the idea with the traps is to let them live so they can take the poisoned bait back to the nest) and it ran right towards the counter again. Today I opened up the drawer that we keep plastic wrap and such in and found a squashed ant. "You got what you deserved," I told it as I tossed it into the trash.

Also, there is a cicada in our basement. It whirrs away, except when I go down to do the laundry or stomp on the ground floor. It will drive me nuts before long. I can't find it, of course, because it gets quiet whenever I get close, though I've tried going downstairs very slowly and quietly. I suspect it's somewhere near where the leak in the basement is. The trouble is we don't know where that is either.

Dad has offered to take care of a Daddy-Do list, should I have one, this weekend. Right now I feel bad making them stay here, let alone fixing up the place, but I did write out a list and KILL THE CICADA is on it.