Ants & Me vs. Cookies

Saturday night I was reveling in the solitude of being alone in my house with nowhere to go and no plans to fulfill.  It was heavenly in a way that can only be appreciated in a life full of enjoyable and worthwhile chaos.  After a most delicious dinner of popcorn and a fruit smoothie, I “needed” one last bit of sweetness (the smoothie had ended much before the salty popcorn) to complete the perfection.  Excitedly, I remembered that our maid, Mila, had made traditional cookies (alfajores) on Thursday, so I opened up the aluminum foiled-covered plate and found that the cookies were crawling with hundreds of tiny ants.

I would be lying if I said I was surprised.  In reality, she’s been experimenting with small different recipes of these cookies for weeks now and always places them on a plate with foil and I always find ants on them.  Curiously, there have been different sized ants with the different recipes.  However, one would think if I (and my roommate) knew this happened we would adjust storage methods, but it hasn’t happened yet.  Instead, I brush off the ants and partake.  This ant infestation was particularly abundant with significantly more ants than usual, so it was a challenge to brush them all off and to prevent them from crawling all over me, but after repeated turns and brushes, I was successful!  My meal had been a little short of protein, so I figured ingesting a few ants would just balance out my food pyramid a bit.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon which inner voice I was listening to, all of my ant brushing energies were used up after one cookie and I decided after some cost-benefit analysis that the efforts of brushing off a whole other cookie was not worth the payoff of eating a second.  I did transfer the rest of the ant-covered cookies to a sealed Gladware container and am going to see what happens to the remaining ants.  Many people here view ants as the enemy, but I prefer to think of us as a team working together to reduce my cookie intake!