Hazy Shade Of Summer

This summer has been indubitably hot.  We already have had more days in the nineties than on average, and we're in the middle of a stretch of nineties right now.  Humidity hasn't been consistently bad, just intermittently bad, and that's bad enough.  And it's going to get worse this weekend -- just when I decide to brave going to a Twins Game, of course.

But the new wrinkle for the past week or so has been the haze in the sky.  Well, I should say that this haze has settled in on the area in the past week, but hearing that our polluted air is being caused by wildfires in the western United States and western Canada has happened every summer for the past, oh, several years.  This has become part of our normal weather in the summer.  We must expect we'll have haze coming from the west this time of year for, well, the rest of our lives, I'm afraid.

My laptop updates itself now, I guess.  A couple of weeks or so ago I saw on my bottom toolbar the temperature and the current weather condition.  Did I ask for it, or did the Operating System just update by itself?  Anyway, some time in the past week I noticed that they also, from time to time, gave an Air Quality Index (AQI).  Hmmm, that's interesting, and useful.  Two days ago I saw the AQI crawl past 150.  I Googled the scale and, uh, you don't want to be breathing in air with an AQI of 150.

I have gotten paranoid about this haze.  We are in the middle of an air quality watch or warning right now until the morning.  The other night, I started to hold my breath, thinking that the air I was breathing in (I don't remember if the window was open or closed) had particles of soot embedded in them.  And then I felt my heart beat faster and harder.  I either was depriving my heart of oxygen or I was scaring the beejeezus out of myself.  But I had the closest thing to panic attacks a couple times in the past week, and they came when I was thinking about what's in the air.

God, I need this annual occurrence to end, now.