Battle with ants

I've always been a cleanliness freak. I like things to be clean, especially in my room. My home, being an old apartment, has the inevitable endless stream of ants, lizards and cockroaches roaming. I don't mind the lizards that much except they sometimes scare me by zipping by too fast. The cockroaches are the ones that get to me as they're extremely disgusting, dirty and plain annoying. In order to solve the cockroach problem, I've resorted to buying those traps they sell in supermarkets. However, this works only to an extent. I'm so glad that I have very brave brothers and father. They always will catch the cockroaches for me no matter how late the night is or when as they know my fear of them.

Next up are the ants. For fear of ants, I do not ever eat or drink in my room. Recently, however, I found that my toiletries cupboard has ants visiting. This puzzles me to no end as there's only toiletries in there. I mean, how sweet or delicious can toiletries be? At first I thought that they maybe fooled by the nice smell of shampoo I kept in there, or even by the fragrance emitted by the pads. But I found out that they are attracted to the razor/shaver I kept there. Again, why they're attracted to the shaver, I'm not sure. I've always believed that to get rid of ants, you have to find out the source that attracted them. By getting rid of the source, you don't have to kill them, they will just disappear by themselves. So, to prevent the ants from coming, I decided to keep my shaver in the cupboard, soaked in a glass of water. I thought that this would be the solution that ends the ants' visit. You can imagine my dismay in discovering that they're still there. Now they can't get to the shaver but it seems that the water that the shaver is kept in is sweet. They ended up staying by the water's edge and kept coming back. Though I don't understand what it is that makes the shaver sweet, I was very annoyed by the ants. I had to clean the shaver and the change the water in the cup daily.

One day, as I was cleaning the cup and changing the water, I decided to use dish washing detergent to try to get rid of the 'sweet' stuff (normally I just change water and rinse the cup without detergent). Then it hit me that maybe I can put a little detergent into the cup and fill it with water, thus making the water I soak the shaver in, to be soapy water. And voila! No more ants! I guess the smell of the detergent is not sweet for the ants and also they're not so stupid as to kill themselves by drinking soapy water. Haha!

I'm still patting myself on the back for winning this battle with the ants. I just feel so smart for thinking of such a solution! Hee....oh happy days....