The Ants Go Marching.

When we lived in the crappy assed house that we were renting before we moved here I envisioned homeownership to be Super Duper Amazing. Super Duper as in no stupid back door ladies to scratch my car with the garbage cans, a bathroom large enough for more than one person to be in it, reliable hot water, sweet, sweet air conditioning and no bugs. But alas apparently mother nature hates me, and although we have this amazing new house we have an ant problem. We learned in the other house to make sure that your counters are really clean and that you have no food out on the counters, and I've kept up these good habits. However I do have pets and they do have food and the evil little ants love dog and cat food apparently.
Today in the span of a couple hours there was a trail of ants across the floor coming from a little divot between the floorboards and where two hardwood boards meet to the container of dog food. The trail was about 3 feet long and 6 inches wide of solid ants. Nasty. Adam and I were able to wrangle them and we sealed the little divot with clear sealant, but there are still a couple rouge little buggers roaming around, just to further piss me off.
A couple days ago they managed to get into the cat food which we keep on top of the drier to keep the dog out of it. There was a line coming from the window (which was closed) down the wall, behind the shelving unit, behind the drier and up the back of it and they swarmed all over the top of my white drier, so they were really obvious. (I didn't sleep well that night) Rather than kill them all, which gives me such glee, I bought some ant poison bait stations and scattered them all over the area in hopes that it would kill the whole colony, or family reunion of the little buggers as it may be. But alas that was $7.99 or so well waisted. Chachi had a great time finding the ant traps and running away from us as we chided him for playing with them.
So here we are at a loss. I hate ants, I hate how they swarm and give me the creeps. I have these horrible dreams that I will wake up and find the baby covered in them.
I've taken to feeding the pets several times a day rather than just in the morning so I can leave them smaller amounts so there is less left out. But I don't see much of a difference in the number of the ants.
The one thing that amuses me about all of this is squirting them with our ant killer which is an organic all purpose cleaner, grapefruit scented. It's probably a good thing that I'm not Buddhist!