Every year, we go to Anchorage over the July 4th weekend.  Last Wednesday afternoon, I was well on my way to being packed and ready to go, laundry caught up, house in order.  Then my husband calls,

"I need a ride to pick up my truck from the repair shop."

I thought this would be a good chance to stop by K-Mart and pick up a few things for the trip.  Because I left the house in a hurry, I only took a small wallet with a credit card, driver's license, and a few dollars in it.  Because it's the day before a holiday, the parking lot is packed, but I didn't mind walking the half mile from the car to the door.

After filling up the cart with all sorts of goodies, including Popsicles and ice cream, I go to check out.  My credit card is denied.  I have enough money to buy the frozen items, and I tell the checker that I'll be back in an hour to pay for the rest.

"Please put my name on the basket," I asked.  She assures me that that won't be necessary.

I hurry home, put the Popsicles in the freezer, and we spend the hour on the phone to the credit card company to find out our why our card was denied when our balance is $0.  Sometime earlier this year, the company changed our card and (supposedly) sent us a new card to replace the one that is no longer valid.  Since we didn't get the cards, we called back to cancel the card.  (Fill in phone jail and press 1 for this and 2 for that ad infinitum...)

Finally with that settled, we go back to K-Mart to get the stuff.  I look where the checker said it would be, and it's not there.  Customer service said, "Oh, we put all that merchandise back on the shelves."

I was going to walk out and go home, but instead I dash around the store, playing memory, and grabbing up the same items from the first shopping.  I forgot a few things, and grabbed the wrong size in another that I'll have to return or exchange.

Finally home after 10 p.m.  I never did get the laundry finished.  I'm not packed, and the house is a wreck.

Oh... and the truck has to go back to the shop.  It's running really rough.

From Bob Herbert:

Hi, Thanks for writing -- The column did not say that mosquitoes had appeared in Barrow for the first time. It pointed out that this was an unusual occurrence. The temperature in the summer in Barrow is generally extremely cool. One official told us it's usually in the 40s. The point of the column was to show a variety of unusual, even strange, events resulting from the sustained trend toward ever-higher temperatures. None of the events mentioned in the column was unprecedented.

This topic arose from a question from one of my readers.  I thought finding the answer should be simple.  It wasn't. I can't imagine anyone thinking that mosquitos are new to Barrow.  Even if Egan's article didn't say that, Herbert's article certainly gave that impression to the reader who asked me, " Are mosquito’s new to Barrow?".

I posted to Global Warming Forum of the New York Times as well as sending an e-mail to Bob Herbert.  If I get any responses, I'll post them here.

My post in the New York times:

Mosquitos in Barrow, Alaska

A recent opinion How Hot Is Too Hot? by Bob Herbert referred to an earlier article by Timothy Egan on the climate in Alaska.

Quoting from Herbert's article:  "the average temperature has risen seven degrees in the last 30 years and mosquitoes have shown up in normally frigid Barrow, the northernmost town in North America."

I've lived in Alaska for over thirty years, and I've never heard that Barrow didn't have mosquitos.  I wasn't able to check out Timothy Egan's article because it has already been archived.  Is Timothy Egan saying that mosquitos are arriving in frigid Barrow only recently because of global warming?

I wasn't able to find anything on the Net about this phenomena.  You would think that something this extraordinary would have at least hit the Fairbanks paper.

Please point me to the scientific article, or any article, that supports the statement about mosquitos in Barrow.

Thanks,
Pamela Joy
Fairbanks, Alaska