Ten Cigarettes A Day??

 Wow, we don't smoke, nor does anyone in our family, but...well we might as well be doing that because that is what the air quality has been like around here. The 'authorities' told their viewers that the amount of atmospheric pollution was like smoking 10 cigarettes a day! YUCK! The reading was 391 for Friday, which is in the hazardous zone (any reading over 300). It has been very stinky outside. Therefore we can't even spend any meaningful time outside due to this bad  air quality. It's due to all the smoke and particulates we are having from the Canadian and some US wildfires. You can see the smog and haze, its awful. I wear an N95 mask when I go outside, even for a short time, I walked to and from my car, on Thursday when I went to my work, and I was wheezing for a good long time when I got into the building. (I didn't think for that very brief time outside I would need one, but I was wrong!)

Anyways we hope the predicted rains, and wind direction changes will help dissipate this smoke. Us pups seem to instinctively spend a lot less time going outside, we go just for potty times...or to bark at the chewy delivery that came to our den on Friday. BOL!

There was a brief rainshower on Friday afternoon, which helped to clear the air for a time, which allowed petcretary to go and clean up after us...and water any pots that didn't get enough water from the measly 1/4 inch or so of the rains.

We hope all those nasty and scary wildfires will soon be under control and that affected peeps will not loose their homes, which is far worse than just having bad air ...

And it is still HOT and very jungle like humidity to help with the very high heat indexes...what a summer! We are more than thankful for the a/c and the HEPA filter in that unit.

Not much else going on here this past week...no news is boring, but not a bad thing!

Anyways here are some image, recent, not flashbacks, but for sure not taken in the past few days of stinky atmosphere conditions. 

Oh dear, she captured the digging evidence...

I sure hope all the bees visiting the clovers don't come after me!

Sharing the shade on a hot day...

We are in the Sunday Selfies Bloghop, and it is hosted as always by The Kitties Blue, at The Cat On My Head

Another New Angel

 Yet again the blogosphere mourns the loss of anther beloved kitty. Jack from Dash Kitten, left us on the 13th. He lived a long life, but still will be sorely missed.

This memento was made in Jack's honor. You can visit his family HERE, to leave messages of comfort.

Jack.

We will be joining the wordless Wednesday blog hop, since angels are wordless, but we will be loving them deeply, forever.

Angels Once Again...

 Once again there are new angels to remember with love and sympathy.

Spike

Ujio

Spike was the beloved kitty , known as Spike the Scottish Black Cat, and Ujio was a darling pup, some of you may know him, there is no blog, but he was on facebook, and the links are there under their mementos, to add your words of comfort if you have not already done so, just click on the captions to go to their respective pages.

We are going to hook up with Awe Mondays, since both of these precious angels surely are awe-worthy.

Not So Tiny Guest And Ussies

 We had buckets of rain the other day, made our grass grow...well...like weeds! The lawnmower was not happy with the thickness and left many clogs instead of mulching it. So soon petcretary will go over it again.And very soon, cause the weather is going to get very hot again. UGH! And humid, to make it even better...not!

Well she managed to get one more privacy panel up Friday evening, but the sweat was dripping off of her...so she will wait with getting the doubled ones on over it all. They help a bit at keeping all the barking down. Us pups CAN see through it, so we sit and watch for activity on either side of the house to have a bark. BOL!

Other than that, petcretary keeps busy with many other chores, it seems there are so many more in the summertime than in the winter. Fill the bird feeders, which they seem to eat way more of now, maybe because of all the cowbirds, starlings and grackles which are not there in the winter, and they all eat like pigs! Even though we have more than one hummingbird feeder, they are not around too much here, this year. And the bee balm which usually finds them all over it,  well they are not. Water the plants, esp the newly planted saplings...clean up after the doggies, pull out weeds...and so on and so on...always something to do, inside and out.

The snowball shrub ( Viburnum ), is either very stressed out from the dry and very hot weather we had recently...but at any rate it needs to be cut back or even dug out...which is a shame, it makes such a pretty sight every spring. I don't know if it is diseased, or has a bug/mold infestation, but it is for sure looking very sad. I will start with a severe pruning, and then wait and see if it comes back next year. A white lilac in the backyard has also seen much better days, so out that will come too. Arghhhh, smells like WORK.

Anyways, here is a moth I have not seen ever, in the 39 years we have been living here. It was quite large, and was on one of the may apple leaves.

Haploa lecontei    

Well, we like to watch petcretary and snoopervise when she is outside with us doing chores...so she got these cute ussies of us...

We missed yesterday's All American Pet Photo Day, so we are showing flashbacks of MrJackFreckles,  Pipo & Minko being patriotic...afterall they were American born 'petizins'! (Images taken in 2010)

We have joined up with all the other Sunday Selfies at The Cat On My Head. Thanks for hosting Kitties Blue!

The 'Day After' Selfies

 Well, we had to pay the hat tax and endured a brief photo session...it was till hot and humid,and the mosquitoes were trying to get lots of vampire acquired meals form petcretary. Thankfully we didn't get any more storms right here...but many people are still without power, including one of our sons who lives just SE of Lansing. Not sure if he has a generator, if not we think he just might invest on one...even fans do not work in power outages, LOL, and it is quite hot and humid. We offered for him to come over here, but so far he hasn't.

There were a LOT of boomers around here...and we could hear them from shows off in the distance. Peeps were letting off fireworks almost all day. Dalton doesn't seem to be much bothered by them, but Benji was very clingy and didn't want to stay outside when we were making the pictures. He ran indoors a few times, poor fella. Hopefully there won't be any more now that *the day* is behind us.

We hope everyone had a fun, safe and meaningful Fourth Of July holiday! The 250th celebration of Independence Day!

We are joining up with The Cat On My Head, where the Kitties Blue are our hosts each week for the Sunday Selfies Blog Hop.

Happy Independence Day ~ 2026 ~ 250 Years ~ Happy Birthday USA!

The weather around here was NOT conducive for putting the dogs in costumes when it cooled off, the thunderstorms blew through here, so we are going to rely on an older celebratory image for this Fourth Of July...

We hope all our friends who celebrate this day will have a fun day, and be keeping safe, too. Let's hope the fireworks won't continue for hours and hours... Around here they may be curtailed, since we have more thunderstorms predicted. We already had over an inch  of rain in a short period on Friday evening, and many people are without power, including one of our sons. They hope to have it restored by the afternoon. Our yard had a lot of branches down, but nothing worse. In some areas trees were knocked out of the ground, there were 80MPH straight winds, we was a lot of wind here, but nothing like that, phew!

Maybe today our doggy boys will be able to have some hat taxes paid...(BOL!) If so we'll show them off in The Sunday Selfies...if not, we'll resort to more 'look-backs'.

Since this 'art', we are going to post it into the Caturday Art Bloghop.

In Memory of Ellie Mae

 Ellie Mae from Momma cat and Her Bear Cat recently became a new angel. So this memento was made in her honor. 

Ellie Mae

We are joining up with the others at Feline Friday