Relative Something

We are living it. Is there some way to fully comprehend ‘crazy’ when we are smack dab in the middle of it? The weather drama of well-predicted impacts from a warmer climate keeps playing out right before our very eyes.

I recently watched two movies about real events that happened in my lifetime. The first was a documentary about the disastrous last flight of the space shuttle Challenger and the second was an actor-depicted retelling of the GameStop stock adventures that happened during the pandemic.

When I see these kinds of movies, I struggle to recapture my perceptions of the events at the time they were playing out. It all comes up rather blurry in my mind compared to the clear and orderly hindsight offered in such films.

If someone eventually makes a movie in the future depicting all the series of weird weather, fires, flooding, and souped-up storms we have been experiencing, will it come across as more explicitly obvious than how we perceive it now? It should.

I suspect it will make us all look bad for how slow or ultimately ineffective we were in reducing carbon emissions.

On Tuesday, it warmed to 53°F by afternoon, and then clouds rolled in bringing snow, gale-force winds, and a drop in temperature to a mere 4°F by yesterday morning.

The average high for the Twin Cities is 35 for the coming weekend. We are expecting temperatures in the 50s and 60s. What a whiplash.

The horses didn’t seem overly ruffled by the extreme temperature swing overnight Tuesday. By the time Asher and I showed up at the barn in the morning yesterday, the wild winds that made eerie sounds all night long had calmed significantly.

The surface of the driveway had a wicked glaze over it. The truck delivering bags of feed almost didn’t make the corner when turning into our driveway. Luckily, she stopped before sliding all the way off the pavement.

By noon, the bright sunshine had cleared off most of the asphalt surface.

Today is the occasion of Leap Day. February has been so unusual weather-wise, the ‘every-4-years’ addition of one day hardly seems worth mentioning.

Not that I’d notice it happened if you showed me a movie about it three years from now.

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