A driver on Stadium honks impatiently at a car in front of him/her who was trying to turn right onto a side street.

It was rush hour, but so what? I mean, I can understand honking in certain limited circumstances. Someone cuts you off. Someone jams on his or her brakes abruptly. But this?

Ridiculous.

I don’t normally quote politicians in this blog, but I have to say amen to these words from John Kerry, spoken in the Columbus neighborhood of Park Ridge Village today:

I’m proud to hear the voices of democracy. Sometimes they’re a little loud, but that’s the nature of democracy and we welcome that. What we really need to do in America, frankly, is stop shouting at each other and start listening to each other.

One of my favorite parts of the summer so far has been the way the light looks at dusk, especially when the fireflies come out and start lighting up the backyard with their silent fireworks. That and the very noisy small group of cicadas that has set up shop somewhere in many trees behind the house and over the fence in the yards of the houses on the other side of us.

There weren’t any out-of-the-ordinary explanations for the temperature drop late last week. According to the Ann Arbor News, a cold front made it way through southeastern Michigan on Friday. The low temperature on Saturday morning matched a record set in 1904 (the temperature got down to 49 degrees both days).

We were walking the dog in a completely deserted Frisinger Park this afternoon when I looked up into a tree and saw what must have been a downy woodpecker (Picoides pubescens) doing a strange little woodpecker dance as it hung onto one of the branches of the tree with its feet and circled the branch 360 degrees, stopping to quietly drill every few seconds. First time I’d ever seen a woodpecker up close. It really didn’t seem at all alarmed by our presence, completely ignoring us for a minute or more before it finally winged off to a higher branch on the tree. Amazing.