I just spent the past 12 hours doing flood control. It was only that long because in doing flood damage control, I discovered that ants had moved in and set up nests along the 10-foot length of the dry bag I’d left there all winter to cut down on flood damage. Thousands of ants. Karen called and asked if it was possible I was exaggerating. I was not.

The good news is that the enemy of my enemy is my friend or something like that, and the groundwater incursion took care of a surprising number of ants. My supposedly environmentally friendly cleaner also was a surprisingly effective tool of mass death. (I hate insect swarms because I feel really bad about having to kill them. But there’s really no getting around that with ants.)

Sadly, ants are not an easily defeated foe, so I am aware that the next few days I will need to remain vigilant and set up checkpoints and demand IDs. There will be no masquerading as the smallish spiders I let live in my corners. (Imagine how much worse it would have been if the spiders hadn’t been there!) And I have left the furniture in that part of the room askew to make checking the baseboards easier.

But we can’t end on that kind of note. Let’s look back at three beautiful things from our week in order to conclude the night in a more positive headspace:

1. The Thai place by my house makes very good (emergency) takeout.

2. Our friend Sarah kindly lent us her car so I could take Rudi to the Baltimore airport early last Friday. Because his flight left before dawn, I was back just as the pretzel bakery by her house was opening and got to enjoy very tasty treats — their specialty drink is a hot Nutella — early in the day.

3. No obvious signs of life yet amongst the peas I’ve planted in the garden, but when I tucked a few of them back into the ground, I noticed they’d grown roots, which is also true of the onion or shallot bulbs I planted last fall.

How about you? Tell me what’s been beautiful in your world this week!