Antz

Remember the movie? We had ants back then too. At the other apartment. But those were bigger, more normal ants. These are tiny, 3-4 mm long. To take this picture in 12/29/2010 i used a 55 mm fixed length lens held by hand at about one inch in front of the 27-105 equivalent focal length from my Sony DSLR 300 camera with the zoom at maximum. It focuses on auto-focus. Can't remember the light source.

They are everywhere on the counter-tops. Especially on the one next to the window. Yesterday i had left about 2 ounces of pomegranate liquor in the bottle. After i drank that i went to sleep normally but woke up kinda wiped out, sort of lethargic. Cannot be the ants that possibly crawled on the bottle and touched the cap now can they? Back then when i took the picture i had traps with honey and borax but they still came. From where? The apartment underneath is vacated.

I looked again while writing this post. The ants disappeared, i can swear i saw them earlier this morning, i'm too used to them anyways. And i also heard a loud door noise and a Jeep noise under the window. The neighbor at Nr.5 left in a hurry.

Antz, eating honey&borax. Click on the picture for better view.

Formaldehyde, among us

For a better view please click on the pictures then on the little icons below.

For better understand of what's to follow, here a couple of links. No, better three:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formaldehyde

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea_formaldehyde_resin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiberboard

Formaldehide as a resin has been long used before today's plastics, to make everyday objects. One of its commercial names was bakelite. Even today you can find in old electrical boxes things made of bakelite like relays and stuff.

Fiberboard is a very convenient way to use wood. You mill the wood down to fiber then mix it with formaldehyde resin and voila... Very cheap and regular boards that you can make wonders with it.

The problem with these is that they are slowly decaying with the result of formaldehyde gas.

That is very easy to understand if you have a floor made of fiberboard. In time, it looses its hardness and becomes soft and molds over all the irregularities of what's underneath. It doesn't break anymore but it bends. And that's because the resin turns to gas and all it's left is the wood fiber. In time, you will walk on something like sand, like on the beach...

To make a long story short, i had some dolomite, a mixture of minerals to treat soil for gardening that i bought from the store a while ago for a different reason. I accidentally mixed it with water and saw that on top in a few hours it accumulates some brownish stuff that smells sweet, very similar with the cabinets and the floor. And i looked onto the label of that sac and it says it has besides lime as main ingredient (CaCO3) 11% and magnesium (MgCO3) in different forms. I did a google search and indeed, some people are researching the possibility of fixing formaldehyde with different magnesium formulas.

I put some pans on the fridge and i saw over the last few weeks that the amount of brown stuff on top is decreasing to maybe 1/4 of what if was in the first day. I add daily water and refresh it if it gets too brown.

I think i got myself a cheap, reusable, visible, quantifiable, formaldehyde trap!