Relative Something

As if the high heat wasn’t enough, we now have the added stress of wildfire smoke dropping our air quality to unhealthy levels. The combination of environmental issues simultaneously becoming problematic gives the impression that we are living the very apocalyptic catastrophes climate scientists have been warning about.

I was indoors at a meeting in Eden Prairie when the visible smoke settled over the region last night. The sight of the thick haze that greeted us as we walked outside shocked us. Over the more than an hour drive to get home, I felt increasingly ill, developing a headache that increased in intensity with each passing mile.

The smell was clearly identifiable as wood smoke when I reached home. Cyndie had been offering the horses some cold carrots and a sweetened block of ice to munch on to give them some distraction from the heat, but there isn’t much we can do for them about the smoke.

As the sun was nearing our horizon, Cyndie found the herd out grazing on the hay field, looking like they were coping fine enough. That takes some pressure off our concerns about whether we are doing enough for them.

If extreme heat and wildfire smoke are something we need to adjust to as a new norm, I don’t want to find out what the next compounding stressor will eventually be that joins them.

Will weird coincidences start to occur? I experienced a freaky one yesterday.

I drove halfway to my meeting and parked my car to ride the rest of the way with someone else. In my car, I had been listening to my music library on my phone through Bluetooth. It doesn’t turn off when I shut off the engine. It stops playing when I open the car door, leaving an earworm of the song in my head as I walk away.

The song was “Times Like These,” by the Foo Fighters.

When my friend started her car, that same song started playing, from the same point where my earworm memory was looping. I grabbed my phone and looked at it, asking if my phone could have possibly connected to Bluetooth instantly when she fired the ignition.

She said, “That’s KQ.” (KQRS-FM, 92.5 MHz)

I tapped “skip” on my Apple Music just to make sure it wasn’t my phone.

Nope. It was her radio station.

What are the odds of that? I gotta say, that freaked me out a little bit.

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