Ants!

It's ant season again. I was miraculously spared from the ant situation during the last two year. But this year, about a week ago, the ants have made a comeback. They totally caught me by surprise! I think it was last Friday morning that my cats came up to me and were trying to communicate with me. At first I thought they were being overly affectionate since I was gone for six days. However, after getting up and entering the kitchen, I saw a huge trail coming from the window sill above my sink, coming across the counterspace, going down to the linoleum floors, toward the kitties dishes. Yuck! I don't believe in bug spray, so I combated them with Windex. I must have killed a thousand of them on that day alone. After this massacre, I thoroughly cleaned my kitchen. The sink, countertops, floors, walls. I wiped, scrubbed, swept, mopped. The ants have ocassionally made appearances, if I leave food out, or a dirty dish out, or crumbs from something I prepared. It only takes 30 minutes for something to be left unattended, and those first little ants who make the first journey to scope out and search for the tiniest of crumbs or grease to come out, before they signal the others that they have found gold!
Besides keeping everything clean, I have put a small dish with crumbs, three or four cat kibbles and sugar outside the house in a couple of random places. I believe, it was our friend, Larry Stevens, who suggested this. He says that once the ants see the food outside, they won't bother coming in the house. I have done this in previous years, and it worked.