Day 69
If you need an indicator for how well a person is going to do in quarantine, I might suggest tea.
If a cup of lemon Lipton sounds okay to you, you’re doing to do okay in quarantine.
If you’re the sort of person who has a special scale for measuring out your loose-leaf oolong, and a special timer for counting down the three minute steep, you’re going to do great in quarantine. You’re going to miss it when it’s over.
But if your style of recreation does not include hot water into which you’ve dipped a soggy bag of yard debris, quarantine is not going to go easy with you. You’re going to take the loss of bowling night pretty hard.
At our habitat we’ve been going through a lot of tea. It’s relaxing and caffeinated and it helps mark the hours. Coffee pushes me around too much. Coffee’s like that friend who only wants to watch sports, and never does the things I want to do. Ain’t nobody got time for that. Tea’s up for whatever.
Plus, a cup of tea is a convenient way to deliver a dose of poison, if you have such a plan in mind.
This afternoon, at work in the Emergency Command and Control Vehicle I happened to notice that the ants were really trying to advance their colonial ambitions. It was time to do something about that.
Something, in this case, was to find the cotton balls we soaked in sugar water and borax long ago, for one of our previous murderous projects. The ants eat the sugar/borax solution, they tell their friends, they all get loaded on the stuff, and that night they all decide to go to Disneyland or somewhere, probably. You never end up seeing them again.
The cotton balls in the ECCV are pitted from a thousand nibbling ant mouths that have partaken of that efficacious draught. Those old balls are crusty and dried out, but a dunk in some water and they’re ready to do their dirty work all over again. I happened to have a glass of water with me, and my teacup from this morning, so I poured a little water in the cup, and dunked the cotton balls of misery in it. They swelled up, ready once again to deliver their cocktail. I set them in a couple strategic places, and it took very little time for hundreds of tiny, naive soldiers to come tank up on sugar, borax, and the saliva of a thousand bygone comrades.
On the subject of things that take very little time, it wasn’t more than fifteen minutes later that I noticed I still had a swig of tea in my teacup. It was awfully sweet, as it went down, which was funny, since I hadn’t put sugar in my cup this morning.
File this entry under: A Taste of His Own Medicine.
