If you were my stalker -- okay, if you were Adam's stalker -- this evening, you might have found yourself hiding in the yuccas behind the house, peering in through the kitchen window (hoping for a glance of that handsome, handsome man), and asking "eh, wha?"

Because I know how it looked. One minute, we were turning off HBO and rounding up the ferrets for bed. The next, we were in full crisis mode in the kitchen. And while your evening spent crouching in the bushes might have been made (The blinds were up! The lights were blazing! Adam came outside and set fire to his hand!), you might have also wondered, what was all the hubub, bub?

Ants.

Just as we were headed to bed, Adam noticed the wall above our kitchen sink was crawling, teaming, black with the scourge some call annoying-but-harmless and I call a call to arms. (Wait...)

In a shining example of tract home construction, the suckers were pouring through the sealed kitchen window. We think we found the very first wave of invaders, as at 8 p.m., the wall was white and not exactly moving, if you know what I mean, and the discovery came at twenty past ten. There were still scores of the bastards, black buggy ants, larger than sugar ants, smaller than fire ants, but still friggin' ants.

We killed as many as we could with our thumbs and paper towels, and then lept to action in our own different ways. I cleared the counters of everything and started scowering. Adam spritzed the cracks with spray adhesive. And, okay, blasting the window with spray adhesive might not be the best idea ever, but I'll regret that another day. It stopped the buggers now. We're happy.

Once the security breach was seeled, Adam went outside to look for the outer breach. After a minute, he came back inside and said, "You know what'd be great? WD-40 and a lighter!"

A couple of minutes later, he came back inside and said, "You know what's great for removing unwanted hair from your hands?"

"WD-40 and a lighter?"

"Fireballs are awesome. Hurty, but awesome."

Yeah, what can you do but keep on scrubbing?

I know that most people -- normal people -- would have killed the first wave of invaders and then headed to bed, and really, I envy those people. It means they didn't have to live in the apartment from hell, the one we moved into about seven years ago, where the upstairs neighbor weighed 4,000 pounds and liked to imitate Michael Flattery, the carpets smelled of the previous tennants' dogs, the landlords wrote nastygrams signed "LYLAS!" and the walls, all of them, were infested with ants.

We didn't find the ants right away. They had the courtesy to show up just after the grace period of "we take it back, you can have your slum!" Like, the morning after. They hung out for three months, and we begged, begged, begged the landlords to send pest guys to fix the problem. The landlords refused. Then the frost hit and the ants didn't come back until February, which the landlords siezed as an opportunity to claim victory via Orkin.

Liars. When the ants returned, they brought reinforcements. We were kind of lazy, we weren't as tidy as we could have been. They were aware of this and exploited it, groupthink-style.

By March, it was impossible to leave any sort of food out on a kitchen counter for more than five minutes. Seriously. It was: DING-DONG! Pizza's here! Oh, great, put it over there, I'll get the Cokes, where's the pizza? It was where that circular black teaming mass is. Oh. -- bad.

We tried everything. We called our own pest guy, we tried bleach and borax and bait. We started cleaning. We finally persuaded the landlords to send us a pest guy, who said, without sounding particularly sorry, that the ants were probably coming up through cracks in the foundation and living in our walls and there was nothing he could do.

By the time we moved in September, we had stopped using the kitchen, because it was too gross. Drowned ants in the dishwasher gross. We resorted to paper plates and eating out. A lot.

So you can see why we'd freak out at the first sign of a problem. We've been in the house for four years without a problem, even though the neighborhood's built on an ant-infested piece of real estate. We've been vigilant. We've been clean. We've been living in drought conditions. I swear, one friggin' wet summer and the little wrigglers just thought they could waltz in to avoid the damp.

Not in my house.