gosling | carpenter ants and bloody footprints

Suddenly late this morning I hear Chip cursing rather loudly from the bathroom. Out of charactor behavior for someone that mellow, so I rush in to see what is wrong. There is the soap holder from the shower shattered in little pieces in the bathtub and ants swarming *everywhere* from the now hole in the side of the wall.

I am looking at the massive ant swarm, trying to figure out if they are carpenter ants (having never seen such a beast prior to this charming event) and access the extent of the damage to the wall. Chip has meanwhile trotted off to hang up his towel over a chair in the study to get it out of the way.

Suddenly I notice that there is a bloody footprint on the bathroom floor. Wait, there's a whole string of them leading to the study... "Do you know you cut your foot?" "Huh?" "Sit down. Let me look at that." "Oh, it's bleeding. I didn't notice."

Ten minutes of direct pressure later it seems to have stopped bleeding. I insist Chip keep pressure on it for a few more minutes however, and trot upstairs to find our upstairs neighbor (who DOES know what carpenter ants look like.)

Yup. Carpenter ants alright. Looks like we've found the main nest too. Our neighbor fetches the rather nasty ant poison he used a while ago on the ant nest he found outside, and we pack the heinous stuff into the hole in the wall and seal it up for now with plastic, hoping that maybe the ants will drag it back in to the queen.

Wednesday the ant exterminator comes, because this problem seems to be a bit beyond our scope, as the entire wall in the bathroom looks like it may be full of crumbling wood and carpenter ants.

And it looks like we're going to need to tear that wall down and replaster and re-tile it, as it's a waterlogged, rotten mess under the tiles.

Meanwhile, Chip (foot bandaged up and no longer bleeding) has gone to the store for stuff to cover the shower wall until we can fix it. (No point in getting MORE water in there.)

And I clean up the bloody footprints and realize I am trying to calculate the length of Chip's stride from the spacing between the footprints.