Our Olde House: February 2026

I found a few ants and unkles stomping around my bathroom floor, which I removed, but more kept coming back. I put an ant bomb under the house to end the problem, but it did not. I still had a few ants in my bathroom, but in addition we got a couple dozen roaches who came from under the house into the kitchen after the bomb went off, where they flopped onto their back and died.

Plan B was to use the liquid ant bait in my bathroom to wipe out the entire colony. The downside of the liquid is that hundreds of ants will come to the bait so any scouts need to be removed before they find a path to the kitchen. I put some bait drops onto a small piece of what Miss Sherry calls ‘tinfol’ and went to bed. A few hours later a bazillion ants were eating the bait; these are the kind of ants that are so small they are hard to see unless the whole herd is there.

A few hours after that all of the bait was gone and the ants were wandering around my bathroom in a drunken stupor, so I gave them some more bait drops. They of course, scattered upon the impact of the drops, but a few minutes later they recovered their wits and were eagerly eating the ant bait. After one day all of the ants seem to be gone, except for a straggler or two who were probably wandering around and missed the ant bait memo, but no, soon there were many more ants in my bathroom. I put more ant bait on a new piece of tinfol and left it for a few more days, after which the ants ignored it. Apparently the ant bait goes bad after three days so I had to replace the tinfol and ant bait drops several more times; I still have a few ants after a week.

Winter hit us with ice and cold, and even a flurry of snowflakes for several minutes. My outside pipe heater worked great, but Miss Sherry and I did spend several nights with the faucets dripping and occasionally flushing the toilets to keep the water in the pipes from freezing and busting the pipes. Our Civil War insulation (none) does not allow the furnace to keep up when the outside temperature is in the 20s for multiple days in a row; our inside temperature was in the low 60s for a couple of weeks, with the furnace running 24×7. I kept two small space heaters that I thought about getting rid of when we installed the Generac, but I am glad I had them to keep our living room warmer. We did not lose power or have another tree fall on the house, so all in all, a very successful yet stressful winter in Mississippi.

I still love the new gutters except that they had a screen at the bottom of the downspouts to trap any debris. Since no debris was supposed to get into the gutters or downspouts, I did not see this as a problem initially. After a few rainstorms, the gutters were catching all of the rain, but a small amount of debris (pin oak leaves of course) was getting through and clogging the downspout screen; I noticed this when water was coming out of the trap door. I called the gutter people (that is descriptive, not derogatory) and they came out to remove the downspout screens.

While they were removing the screens, I also asked them to reroute one downspout and raise another one so I had more slope on the pipe taking the water farther away from the house. I was getting some water under the house when it rained, but after this downspout adjustment I do not seem to be getting any water under the house. I cannot be sure because it has not rained very hard or for a long time since, but I am hopeful.

Spring finally sprang just a few days after Groundhog Day, which seems to be the start of Spring in Mississippi. I was thinking about firing up the big mower and taking a few laps around the backyard just for fun, but I will probably have to trickle charge the battery before it will start the mower. I could assemble the gutter snoot and clean out the front and back gutters, but they may not need it since the pin oak has lost all of its leaves. I should fly my drone over the gutters and verify if they are clogged or not, but I would have to charge its batteries first.

I suddenly remembered that we were retired, and with temperatures in the low 70s, Miss Sherry and I decided instead to take a drive to a place where her family used to rent a cabin by a lake on some weekends when she was a child. These cabins were recently extensively updated and look like nice apartments from the pictures, but they are still standalone. The cabins looked great and we will be back to rent one, and the best part was that the entire surroundings looked nice, just like it did many years ago. I think Miss Sherry really appreciated the State preserving and protecting this place and her wonderful memories of nice times with her family. I like that too.