Humidity & Bugs: Another Summer in Morristown

I am going to tell you something that might make you a little hot, uncomfortable even, it may even make you sweat just to hear it.  Here it is....We don't have air conditioning in our house.  We have air conditioners in the bedrooms but the common living spaces can become like a casserole. As I type, it is 85 degrees in my living room and I swear the dogs are panting out Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers’ Islands in the Stream in perfect rhythm.  

So, it’s been really, really hot and I have to wonder if it is this crazy heat that is the reason behind the absolutely behemoth sized bugs I have been seeing this summer. When spring broke and it really started to get warm, I noticed some mosquitoes that I swear were prehistoric in size.  You know the kind with the long dangly disjointed legs that fly much in the same way an old lady drives a car, just kind of randomly flying in to things with seemingly no particular place to go. And the other day, I saw something that I swear if someone else told me they saw, I would have thought they were just crazy. It was a crawfish and it was just walking through our parking lot at work. Nope, I don't work on the Bayou, I work here in Morristown and there was a crawfish ambling through the parking lot, minus one craw, or, claw, so he/she was really hobbling.  And I wondered if this was it, if we have reached the next stage of evolution where our pinkies fall off because they are essentially useless and the next wave of sea creatures come up on to the land and adapt.  Is this oppressive heat the sign?   

If this is happening, someone needs to get on a Crawfish formula for Raid because this is not what I want to find in my house. Did you know there were crawfish here in the North?  In Morristown? He was big too.  I tossed him back in the pond that I assume he came from.  Using my super powers of deduction, and thinking if this was not an actual moment of evolution, I assumed a bird probably grabbed him and dropped him on the pavement, hoping to break his shell for a good mid-day snack, so I tossed him back in the water. He did not seem grateful at all and in fact did his best to get me with his one working claw-I concluded he was a male crawfish based on this behavior.  

Aside from the sometimes oppressive heat there is very little I dislike about the summer, except the bugs. I am fine with bugs being "out there." When they come "in here" I have issue.  Specifically, these mosquitoes.  Our house is not near any water, so why the abundance and crazy super size of the 2011 mosquito? 

I am a bit of the weather buff, I can not watch enough Channel 61 traffic and weather, (yet it is amazing how often I get caught without an umbrella). Anyway, when I watch the weather, as they travel up the map from south to north giving the temperature and humidity of the major cities in New Jersey, in almost every single instance in the summer, Morristown is always hotter and more humid than any place south and south east of us.  It makes no sense to be more humid than towns farther south and closer to the water, does it? And sometimes I get so excited as someone who has bad hair from pretty much May to October, when Trenton will come in at 58 percent humidity, I think - hurray, good hair day - then they move up the map to Morristown where it is at 89 percent and I think - crud, another day where no amount of time spent in front of the mirror with comb in hand will matter even a little bit.

So, is Morristown sitting on an underground lake of lava or what?  Why are we more humid than the Jersey Shore sometimes? Why does some women’s hair resist humidity altogether and why are these cock-a-doody mosquitoes so big this year? And the spiders??? Oh my.  I found a black spider sitting right on the table on our deck, as if he was waiting for a burger. He was black with meaty legs and white spots all over his back. Now I just read that some poor man in Colorado just died from what they are thinking might be 20 Black Widow bites on one of his feet. Now, honestly, do I know what a black widow looks like?  No, I don’t. I could be drinking tea with a black widow spider right now and not know it, so, what is the safest thing to do?  Assume all spiders are poisonous and avoid them as I do. And I don’t run screaming from the house, I simply alert the resident bug-remover who always comes quickly with his weapon of choice, the damp napkin, to remove it-never killing it (though I think he lies to me, I think he kills a lot of them, even though I insist they be put out the window.)  And if bugs were really just flying baby fawns or kittens, I would not need the bug-remover, I would manage myself, rolling on the floor and giggling like a child if a tiny flying fawn flew up my shirt sleeve, but if a spider or monstersquito did the same, only running and screaming, flailing and more screaming until Jim found it and got it off me would suffice. Then a long hot shower and possible burning of the clothes-I just don’t like the bugs.  

It would be great hear from any climate change/weather buffs out there, always happy to be made fun of when my theories can be logically squelched.