The End of the World????

I just had to laugh at something that occurred this week at home.
We had just had a few days of stormy weather, which resulted in the many gum trees on our block shedding lots of bark, leaves and twigs all over the yard.
As I'm still on school holidays, I had the time to do a really good clean up.

The condition of the yard after the storms.

However, while doing this, I noticed one of our neighbours hovering near the fence that separates our respective blocks of land. Usually this is 'the signal' to wander over and have a chat, but because I was on a roll and getting a lot done in the heat, I ignored her and kept raking and listening to the radio.
This was too much for her, and before long she came charging up our yard to see me.
Let me say now, what I said under my breath when I saw her coming, and what I actually said to her were two entirely different things!!

After some general small talk about insignificant matters (like how she has had to move the occasional twig out of the way when she walks her dog through through our block!) she came out with the big problem.

It went something like this...

"I have to mention something to you that is very troubling. I found some ants in our yard recently, and I have followed them. It appears that they are coming from your yard, and they are crawling under the fence and coming into our yard. They might be coming from someone else's yard and just passing through yours, but they are definitely coming into our yard"

When I quizzed her about the ants, she said they were 'giants', about 2-3 cm in length.

Having not seen any six legged monsters during my raking of the yard, I was not overly concerned, but agreed to come and see them.

Well, all I saw were a few of the common meat ants that live everywhere out here, just going about their business looking for food and paying scant respect to the wire fence that was the border between our two blocks. They were hardly the 'giants' that I had been warned about, and there was not much of an 'invasion' happening either!!

So, after feigning deep concern, I promised to be ever vigilant for the rest of the day and to do all that I could to locate the source of these evil arthropods. 

On a block like this, one would expect ants to be somewhere!!

In the end, if all that she is worried about is a few ants travelling between our two blocks of land, then all is well in the world!!