it's Friday night

It's been a week.
Before I describe the trivialities, let's think of Mary.
Mary is the most selfless person I've ever heard of and I'm going to be thinking of her this weekend.
We'll think of Mary, and K's aunt who is very sick, and you, if you need us to.
My friend A is done with her treatment and is recovering nicely.
We are all well, though Oldest had a tough week, he's doing better tonight.
And then there's the ants.
I'll tell you the story of the ants.

The shower, upstairs (in the bathroom renovated, what? five years ago?) has been leaking. Bad grout, poor tiling, it's hard to tell. Long story short (for this part), K took down about one square foot of dining room ceiling where a leak from above left a water stain. Then, after several experiments with a garden hose brought up from outside and into the bathroom through the window, he determined what needed fixing and fixed it. Twice. Presently, it seems to be staying dry.

But, what about ants, you wonder?
Well, we had ants last summer. We took special care to wrap things or put them in plastic containers but we still saw ants. Big ants. We found them in the kitchen and up in our bedroom and sometimes in the bathroom that was leaking. We put down baking soda, we sprayed, we laid traps and we left dryer sheets in the pantry. We did just about everything we read about, but the ants persisted.

When the weather turned colder there were fewer of them and we let ourselves think we had won the battle.
But they came back.
K lobbied for total ant detection and removal, which would entail removing the cabinets on the wall under the leaky bathroom (which backs on the chimney). I disagreed. I couldn't imagine the work involved and thought we'd never get the cabinets re-installed properly.
But, yesterday, Oldest opened some cookies and they were infested and K had had enough.
He emptied four cabinets and removed them from the wall.
He found black mold. He took down sheetrock and found a giant ant nest.
Luckily for me, I was at work.
Middle (who was assisting) said the wall was so infested that they had to walk away for a few minutes to decide on a strategy.
They beat the ants but my kitchen is all over the house.
The shower had been leaking into the kitchen wall too and we are hopeful that part of the house is dry now.
We'll wait and see, K will replace the wall and re-install the cabinets and we'll decide if we need to gut the bathroom (which we don't really have the budget for).

I'm writing about all of this because it's easier to write about trivial matters like sheetrock and ants than it is to discuss Aunts and losses.

It's Friday night. We're looking forward to the weekend.