We live in an apartment. This apartment is small. This apartment is VERY small. So as a result, our food pantry is in our basement – which means that unless there’s something I need for dinner that night, I don’t really have much of a reason to go down there. This ALSO means that if there were to, hypothetically of course, be a PROBLEM in our basement – or perhaps THREE problems – it could potentially be several days before I’d actually know about it.
I tell you all of this to properly paint the picture of what happened to me the other night. I had ordered a bottle of red wine vinegar, which of course didn’t turn out to ACTUALLY be red wine vinegar but instead was balsamic vinegar (ah, the joys of buying groceries online). Whatever. But since I don’t USE balsamic vinegar very often, I needed to venture downstairs to put it in storage.
I made it down to the bottom of our staircase before noticing that the floor was wet. For reasons that I cannot explain (humidity? change in temperature?), we somehow had an explosion of seltzer that resulted in the equivalent of about 12 cans floating on our basement floor.
“Well, that sucks,” I thought, as I resigned myself to beginning to towel it all up. But as I bent down, I noticed that I was not alone. I was instead joined by hundreds upon hundreds of ants, many of them fighting to survive the tsunami that had formed by my paper towel attempting to clean everything up.
Completely baffled by how they could have gotten there, I began following their tracks and traced them to a box of Oreos that I had been hoarding for months because they were such a good deal that it pained me to actually eat them (no, the irony of this statement is not lost on me). It seems as though there may have been a flaw in one of the seams and, well, the ants have been having a nice time.
“OK, strike two,” I thought, as I finished toweling up the seltzer and moved on with my bleach bottle to battle the ants. Things were going fairly well until I realized that I had left my balsamic vinegar bottle on one of the stairs earlier. I jumped over the pile of towels, grabbed the vinegar, and put it on the top shelf of our pantry. Completely out of the blue, I had to sneeze, and as my arm shook, I watched my vinegar teeter on the edge of the shelf and come crashing down onto the ground, breaking into a million pieces (over my pasta boxes and bottled water, mind you) and spilling sticky, SWEET vinegar virtually everywhere.
So we basically need to move. Like, today. Because I’m not venturing downstairs ever again.