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The morning view

  The day starts at 80 degrees.  There is humidity.  The high will be 95.  I try to take my lunch-time walk earlier in the day but that doesn’t always work out.  Sometimes I walk at a hundred.  It’s very tropical this time of year. We drink morning coffee at our peril.  We’re in the path of the ruby-throated hummingbird fall migration.  All four feeders are busy.  Buzzing, battling, high-speed hummingbirds with those long sharp bills resemble small darts.  Sitting on the deck involves involuntary ducking. 
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I have some thoughts about the accelerating pace of change today

 In that context though, I think about our ancient ancestors and I’m struck not by the accelerating pace of change today, but by the incredibly slow pace of change throughout all of our human history up to now.  Imagine homo-sapiens or Neanderthals on a sparsely populated planet.  Every day they get up in the morning and it is the same as the day before.  For years, decades, and generations, nothing changes.  If they didn’t know how to make fire the day before, they weren’t going to know how to make fire the next day either.  Stories could be passed down from generation to generation to generation about how the world was and how it had always been. Change was imperceptible.  Technical breakthroughs, changes in climate, changes in social norms; nothing changed at a detectable rate.  For each generation it had to seem like nothing would ever change.  There was no reason to think it ever would.  
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It’s hard to cheer for the Chiefs

 I like the team, I like to watch them play, but that awful tomahawk chop chant.  My head is so susceptible to earworms, I can’t listen to it without replaying it in my head for the next several days.  (Oh shit, it’s started already just by saying it.)  So when I watch the Kansas City Chiefs, I have to watch with the sound off. And by the way, if I was standing in front of a Native American, and I was doing the tomahawk chop, I would be beyond embarrassed and I would stop. So GO CHIEFS!  And please, lose the tomahawk chop.  
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Yard Bird

 Here is an unusual yard bird for the United States. A groove-billed Ani.  We hear or see it from the deck almost every day in the summer!Not the best photo from the deck, but the bird doesn’t give us many chances. Here is a better photo from another time. It’s a tropical member of the cuckoo family.  It only migrates this far north in the summer for a few months, then disappears south all winter.  They live in small groups and all lay their eggs in one communal nest.  Everybody participates with incubating the eggs and caring for the young.