But I took it all in stride, killing the black army with a wet sponge and paper towels, because I had read years ago that ants always invaded homes around this time of year looking for water. I figured once it started raining the invasion would leave, as Mother Nature supplied them with the necessary beverage. Unfortunately I was wrong.

The rains came and the ants got worse. So that's when I decided whoever wrote that newspaper article didn't have a clue what he or she was talking about and I had to find a solution fast.

But fast isn't easy when you are someone who doesn't want to use pesticides, especially in a kitchen.

That left me with organic solutions like wiping the counter down with vinegar, balling up wads of napkins soaked with ammonia and placing them along the counter corners and leaving Epsom salt crystals in various strategic spots.

In the past these deterrents worked, but this time nothing seemed to do the trick—perhaps my home had become the victim of a mutant race. On any given morning I would wake up to a trail of ants happily traveling across my kitchen countertops, or up the side of the oven or even through an electrical outlet.

Still, I was determined not to give into pesticides as the final solution, and I found myself absent-mindedly killing ants with my hand as they passed by, treating them as more of an annoyance than a problem and hoping the pests would just disappear one day. That attitude prevailed until the ants' radar seemed to crank up to a feverish pitch, reminding me of Disney's version of Antz.

One morning the situation became too much to handle, with the population taking over my kitchen and me becoming totally grossed out. It led to my husband unscrewing the electrical outlet by our stove and making a run to Home Depot to get ant bait to stick on the outlet ledge, followed by spraying some ant killer spray, which unfortunately blew out the connection to the electricity in part of our kitchen. By that evening the problem looked to be under control, with only one or two survivors escaping and scurrying across my kitchen counter. Nothing that a quick attack of the human hand couldn't handle.

I was confident that our insect problem had abated, and that the survivors would drown outside in their nests during the next series of storms. But once again I was wrong.

The other morning, walking into the kitchen while it was still dark—I don't particularly like turning on lots of lights at 6 a.m.—I was reaching to open the pantry to get out the pancake mix when I noticed that the cabinet doors appeared to have a lot of black specks. To my horror I saw that those specks were moving. It appeared that the invaders had opened a second front and were probably coming after me for killing their brethren. As I traced their trail, I noticed the troops were marching over the decorative railing on the top shelves that surround the upper part of my kitchen. It was ugly. It was bad, and it was time for weapons of mass destruction.

The good thing was that the colony was so high up we could put out ant bait in various locations. And the invasion actually did have an unexpected upside to it. My entire pantry was subjected to a massive cleaning, which turned out to be a good thing, knowing how many expired or half-used items should have been trashed months, even years, ago.

Now my husband swears that the bait we used is formulated to trick the invading forces into thinking they have found food to take back to the colony, resulting in mass suicide. I sure hope he is right. Time will tell.

But this morning when I came into the kitchen, things were looking pretty good: not a straggler to be found. If only other solutions to life's daily problems could be this easy.

Moryt Milo is the editor of The Willow Glen Resident. She can be contacted at 400.200.1051 or mmilo@svcn.com.