I learned something new today…
If you leave the remnants of sugar that spilled out of a bag of Watermelon Sour Patches (best candy ever!) from last football season (yes, one year ago… I believe from that blessed day when UW beat USC…) in the bottom of the center console of your car, nothing happens… IF you live in Washington. In Washington, sugar just sits there. Waiting. Waiting for a full car detail to erase its existence (clearly not a priority for me in the past 12 months), waiting for a moment of starvation where the granules of sugar get licked up by a hungry driver… I don’t know. They just sit there, and they have in my car for the past 365ish days.
However, in Arizona, a few granules of sugar cannot just sit in the bottom of the console beneath the spare napkins, winter gloves (that I now sometimes wear to touch my steering wheel when it’s extremely hot out), and sunglasses. Lingering sugar must be consumed… by ants.
I was driving to school today when something caught my eye down below. Movement around my stick shift. I squint and see that black ants are climbing all over my center console. At first I think they must be attracted to the remnants of an Americano I spilled in my car last spring. I mean, it’s been cleaned of course, but you can still see streaks of lingering white chocolate goodness if you look closely. Then I realize that the ants seem to be coming in and out of the covered compartment where I store the seasonal items mentioned above. So the Americano remains must be dessert and I figure the main course of the feast must be inside… but since I was driving, very erratically I might add as the ants were demanding my attention instead of the road, I could not proceed with my investigation until I arrived at school.
I have to say that my pets made me uneasy as I was driving along. At first, I was afraid they were fire ants and I was going to get bit and swell up like I always do… then I realized they seemed to be pacifists… just really in it for the food. When I finally got to pull everything out of the compartment, I saw a few little specks of sugar at the bottom. The remnants of my snack at a UW football game last year had now become lunch for my new pets… I cleaned the area out as best as I could with Armor-All wipes I found in my trunk. When I went back tonight to do a more thorough cleaning, my visitors were gone! There is still a little sugar left in the bottom, so maybe they will be back again tomorrow for seconds.
I have always been anti-pets, but maybe I am changing my tune in this new Arizona lifestyle…
