It was Sunday night, after a particularly busy weekend. I was at home sleeping. Susan, my fiance was at her house finishing up laundry.

Susan's house, which is built into a hillside, has a basement with a 3 foot tall terrace on one end which has exposed dirt. She was moving laundry from one machine to another when she noticed movement in the area of the terrace. She looked closer and saw thousands of flying creatures swarming everywhere. Right before her eyes, they were building a mound in the dirt next to the water heater.

Not having any ant spray or other real pesticides in the house, she did the only logical thing she could think of, she poured Febreeze all over the mound, and then quickly went to the phone to call me (who was in bed -- it was around 2:00am). I live with my parents, and we were all very much asleep. Unfortunately, we didn't hear the phone ringing. She left a message, but since our messaging system is from the phone company, not a machine, we didn't hear the "Brian, please wake up!".

Up the hill she went, and with some knocking on the door, she managed to wake up Mom and Dad, and they woke me up. I headed down to her house with a can of Ant Spray in hand.

Into the basement we went, and there were still flying things all over... yikes, sure look like the swarms that Termites have when they want to establish a new colony. No new mound, though, Susan's Febreeze had halted that construction. I applied a little ant spray (ok, I emptied the can!) into the basement until there wasn't a single flying thing in the room. I inundated the dirt that they'd come up through, and I kept pushing the button on the spray can long after it did little more than sputter.

The next morning, Susan called the various pest control places, one of which was out of business, another of which could not forward her call through their automated system to the local branch, and finally to a local company in Sutter Creek. She told them "we have Termites" and they said "We'll be the judge of that". They sent a man out to verify that they were indeed termites, and sure enough, he said "yep those are 'southwestern something something termites. You need to schedule an appointment for an inspection" and left.

She scheduled an inspection which was this morning. The guy came and looked around all the places it was easy to look, and a few it wasn't (couldn't get into her son or daughter's rooms upstairs, they were a mess, but unlikely they'd be there). His conclusion? Our clever combination of Febreeze and Raid had destroyed the infesting swarm, and he could find no other evidence of termite construction or damage or infestation in the house. He made some recommendations to make the house less um... tasty to termites, and plans to give us an estimate if we want to pre-emptively poison the area.

Overall, a good conclusion to a relatively stressful crisis. We'll definitely have to keep our eyes open for future attacks.