This Ain't A Scene, It's An Armsrace

I swear, it's like I'm at war with the bugs in my area. Can you see why I'm not super fond of summer now?

The latest battle in my ongoing war with the bugs has pitted me against the endless army of small, tiny, annoying ants. I know I'm way bigger than them, yes, and that they can't really do much, but I'm not wholly convinced that this speces is one of the non-biting ones. I keep finding more and more bumps mysteriously appearing over my body, and I can't help but assume that while I sleep, some little bug is crawling over and using me as a buffet. Last night, I returned home from my Japanese test in Okayama City to find that the stray ant or two I'd been finding recently had a source - a source that was interested in something in my bedroom! They were EVERYWHERE. It turns out that one of the chocolates I had at the bottom of a box had melted and was attracting them into my room... so I put the box outside, but was too paranoid to sleep since I kept finding groups of ants popping up here and there. And vacuumed. Boy did I vacuum. it was almost as if my room was giving me a sign saying "Jessica, you haven't vacuumed in AGES well now is a really good time to do that."

I thought about spraying my room but well, the problem was that this was my bedroom, which has tatami. So if I sprayed... my room has little to no ventilation so basically I'd be sleeping with my head in a cloud of pesticide. I have a spare room, but I'd kind of put a bunch of stuff in there from when they were coming to fix my fridge and I had to clean the place up real fast. Yeaaaaaah.

Needless to say, I didn't go to bed until pretty late. I'm really glad that this week is test week and I have very few actual classes to teach...

But okay, so that was last night. I don't know if these bumps/bites on my arm are from the ants or not, but I've got a good couple on my arms. What's more, tonight, I also found three clusters of ants in my house: one near the umeshu (plum wine) I tried to make (we'll see how that goes), one cluster near the light switch/soup, and one sparse group in the shower. I was like omg, wat, this is WAR.

It's a good thing I went to buy ant stuff today. Seriously, I loaded up on what I could find (in addition to buying hiking boots - I'm going to attempt to climb fuji this weekend! AHHHH. There's a small chance I'm going to die. I'm so incredibly out of shape right now it's not funny. I need a hard schedule to follow, otherwise I end up slacking off. I've also been eating too much recently - I blame the billion birthdays that have happened lately.). This included this nifty ant killer spray with a thin nozzel that sprays a very direct cloud versus one that's kind of wide and eventually ends up just floating down. Very happy with that purchase. Also bought bug trappy-bug-takes-this-thing-back-to-nest-and-it-hopefully-kills-everything thing that reminds me of the cockroach ones. I put those outside my house... hopefully they'll sufficiently distract the ants from the inside of my house. :x

I'm getting better though. I stay under enough control to where I could actually get teh vacuum and take care of it, since before even doing that would be questionable.

So that's my battle with ants, in my war with the bugs. I also fought a battle against the mosquitos. That one, I'm pretty sure I lost. I was waiting for my bus after the test on sunday, and not one, but TWO full buses went by us. It felt like I really was at school again.

Oh, as an aside, I've been taking "beginner" Japanese classes through the city. They're "learning Japanese through real life situations and learning about Japanese culture" kind of classes, and mainly aimed at foreigners - students, mostly since there's an international college really close to where I live. Except most of them are Korean or Chinese. And since I know the guy who's organizing it... he asked me to come and I said sure why not. It's good practice. Definitely not beginner though. I saw at least 4 people from that class at the Japanese proficiency test, all all of them were taking either N2 or N1 - the top two levels (out of 5). I was taking 3 (and got my butt kicked). Yeaaaaaaah. It's fun though.Anyways, I digress.

As I was waiting for the bus, I felt this stinging and then intense itching on my legs. Those little mosquito bastards had bitten my legs at least 5 times. FIVE. They're all painful too. And itch like something rotten. I went from having no bug bites to BAM having a lot. That only made me not like the test even more haha.

Yeah, so the mosquitos won that round, but eventually i pushed my way onto a bus haha.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that on the bus ride over, I found a tiny little spider hanging by a thread from one of my hairs? I was very impressed that I didn't freak out or scream. I just, carefully, with my voucher, pushed it off. Super gross. Do not want.

So yeah, bugs, you may be winning the battles, but I shall win the war.