Posts Tagged ‘strange coincidence’
Stress Compounded
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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New Oven
It’s not hard to imagine that sometimes it is hard to imagine. We all have the ability to simply make things up, creating stories that never actually happened. It’s a thought exercise. Like all exercise, the more you do it, the easier it gets.
I find I am more inclined to take the easy route and rely on describing what I actually experience. Turns out, it is often less believable than what I could conjure up in invented tall tales.
Case in point, this actually happened… The low-battery warning chirp started on our main smoke detector on the very day we first used a newly installed gas stove/oven in the kitchen. How’s that for timing?
Added context will help to deepen the intrigue.
As Cyndie has amped up her baking in the last few months, the shortcomings of our aging oven were becoming a growing annoyance. We don’t know whether it was one of the original appliances in our 30-year-old home, but the advancing rust and warped door that wouldn’t entirely close helped justify taking the leap of purchasing a replacement.
An added incentive, having tolerated the dissatisfaction of cooking on an electric range in the 8-years since we moved in, we could finally change back to gas burners that we have both always favored.
I needed to change out the 240 VAC, 50 Amp circuit for a 120V/15A, and we needed to hire a professional to add a new gas line from the furnace room up to the kitchen. That was all rather straight forward to accomplish. Timing and doing the purchases online were the harder parts of the project.
Everything ordered seems to take longer than expected during a pandemic and getting all the specs right with clicks on browsers is not a given. Cyndie originally thought she was getting a dual-fuel double electric oven with a gas range. She succeeded on the double oven, but not the electric part. The difference was not a show-stopper, so all gas it is.
The oven arrived before the gas line had been installed, so the gas plumbers were the ones to install the LP kit on the oven when they arrived. Here is how that all went:
- They cut an electric wire while drilling through the kitchen floor.
- At their expense, an electrician would arrive the next day to repair.
- Cyndie ran the double ovens for an hour or two per manual instructions to burn off and season the surfaces.
- Owner of plumbing company showed up following day to fix wiring.
- Cyndie demonstrated for him how the bottom oven sounded like a jet engine and he freaked out and turned it off in near-panic.
- By that afternoon, first guy returned to discover he missed installing the LP reducer in the second oven.
- We all envisioned the several catastrophic calamities that had just been narrowly averted.
The day when everything was finally correct and Cyndie used the range for the first time to boil potatoes, the smoke detector beeped. The occasional beeping seemed inconsistent to me, leading us both to suspect it had something to do with the new gas range. Maybe there was some problem with the adjustment of the burning flame that needed to occur?
There wasn’t smoke, but could it be carbon monoxide?
Well, no. It was the low battery beep. Installed new batteries and have used the stove and ovens without mishap since.
How’s that for timing?
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Relative Something 