Flying Ant Attack

We're sitting in the dark.  The flying ants have won.

Some kind of flying ant invades our house about twice a year.  It's infrequent enough that we pretty much forget about them in-between times.  Owen thinks it has something to do with lots of rain.  Anyway, it's bizarre and almost Alfred-Hitchcock worthy.

I tried but failed to get a photo that explains our predicament and it's just not possible.  You'd have to see them just covering the room and the (ineffective) screens, coming after the light.  Their wings fall off, they lay dead all over the floor, they fly around, they are gross in their sheer numbers.  

I mean, what's really sad is how clean my floor was earlier today before it started raining and all these messy winged ants came in.  I took the dust-buster and went after them.  It was a very effective clean-up method--I was even able to catch some out of the air--and it was soon full and swarming with live bugs.  So I switched on the front outside light and took it outside in the rain to dump it.  Only due to the amount of diligent attention the landlords give to the grooming of the patio, I couldn't just dump it out off the front balcony.  I have to go out in the rain and dark and try to get the bugs out of it.

So I took it apart and tried to knock the bugs off on the outside of the wall that surrounds our property.  (Did I mention it's raining?)  And of course a piece of the vacuum ends up falling outside of the fence, which involves a lot of shouting to Owen to buzz the gate and find a flashlight (it also causes some familiar irritation with his rather slower reaction times--did I mention it was raining?) as well as some digging around in weeds in the dark.

I got back in with a wet dust-buster and laid all the pieces out to dry--only to realize that leaving the balcony light on through all of that called every winged creature into our windows while I was out there.  Our screens are not equal to their determination.  So our living room is filled back up with bugs.  

We turned the light out, it's the only true solution.  And I guess even if it doesn't work, at least we won't see them, right?