Ants, Smoking Closets and Alarms…

What a weekend! One of the first things we noticed upon returning home is that the ants are moving into our house. Ferrara has gotten a lot of rain lately, and apparently, we’ve been designated the local emergency shelter for the affected ant population. Add to this the fact that Songbird has decided she’s terrified of ants and we’ve had quite the dramatic production going on here. We’re still not sure what to do about that. 

I’m having Florida flashbacks. We used to get teeny tiny see-through ants called ghost ants climbing all over the counters and bathtubs looking for water. It wasn’t pleasant, and they were almost impossible to get rid of! I confess I welcomed the monthly pest control plan we had in both of our Texas homes. Italy is a little to eco friendly for that, though, so I think we’re on our own.

After episode 1 of the ant drama died down, I started the laundry. There’s always so much laundry. I think it breeds at night in the clothes hampers! Anyway, about halfway through Thursday, we started to smell something strange. (Songbird would like me to point out that she smelled it first). It was familiar, but I couldn’t remember why, and it was really strong in the entryway. Finally it dawned on me that it smelled like we’d blown a fuse. I opened the box to turn the offender back on (this is a pretty normal occurrence), and was greeted by a little smoke, but all of the switches were in the “on” position. Weird. We went around the house checking everything, but everything was still functioning and the smell was still really strong. I didn’t see flames anywhere and kept a pretty close eye on it until The Linguist came home and called the electrician.

He did an initial assessment and told us he’d return the next day to take a more in-depth look. When he arrived Friday he opened some kind of panel in the wall and started freaking out and saying whoever wired this should go to jail. Our wires had been taped together instead of being routed through more official-looking clear pieces that he was waving around in the air while he ranted. He said that because the wires weren’t in there correctly, there was arcing between the wires when we ran high-usage appliances (like the dryer, oven or dishwasher) and we’re darn lucky we didn’t end up with our house on fire since we use those particular appliances a lot. 

Disaster averted, we spent Saturday handwashing our dishes and hanging our laundry on an old rack we found in one of the outside buildings. The electrician came and fixed the wiring last night, so hopefully we’re out of danger now.

Everything seemed just peachy until we tried to leave for church this morning. As the linguist set the house alarm instead of calm, the alarm started shrieking. He attempted to turn it off again which made it stop for 30 seconds and then started wailing again. Then we heard the shrieking rise in pitch (which indicated that the inside alarm was going off, as well.) The kids and I shut the door to the van before our hearing was permanently damaged.  The Linguist (poor guy) spent 10 minutes or so trying to get the alarm to turn off, but to no avail. In the meantime, cars driving by and people walking by were staring at the house as they passed. 

We finally had to call the electrician (again), who came over half an hour later to try and fix the problem. He was able to turn the alarm off and we left for church an hour late. He came back later and finished the job!  So our alarm is now good to go.  We’ve seen him enough since moving in that he might be considered our closest friend in Ferrara!

And so ends this week (Italians start the week on Monday)…we still have ants (which resulted in another fit of hysteria from Songbird), but we have averted the fire danger and shouldn’t be plagued by any rogue alarms in the future.