At around eight o’clock this morning I was taking a pile of collapsed cardboard boxes out to the wood shed to toss onto our recycle pile. A couple of times a year we haul a few hundred pounds of cardboard down to the Big City and toss it all onto a huge heap at a transfer station. We could get paid for it, but the people at the weigh station/payment window look at you like you’re a starving Bangladeshi or something since cardboard goes for a minuscule one-point-two-five cents per pound. In spite of that sometimes I drive onto the scale and get weighed just so I can see how much mud and cow manure, by weight, has accumulated in the fender wells over the winter. Slows you down, and costs more in fuel I figure, so what the hey. Then after dumping the cardboard I go back and get weighed again and pick up my dollar or so. I can handle the “Are you serious?” looks and slowly shaking heads in the payment booth. I am comfortable in my skin.
So what does this have to do with the picture of what looks like a heap of daisy petals lying on the ground? They are right at the entrance to the wood shed where I was headed with cardboard. Those petals are the wings of a whole bunch of ants that are getting ready to launch and spread ant-ness around the foothills. These are tough guys/gals since they can launch right off the ground, unlike the wimpy termites that have to crawl up their launch towers in order to get airborne. Thus the “Ants rule; termites drool” headline.
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