Nature Friday – Beautiful Butterflies

Hi everyone! It’s Walter here. Sorry we haven’t posted much. Our only excuse is a lazy secretary.

We need to get better help if we want to post more often. BOL!

Today I want to show you some butterflies. They sure do love our Blue Fortune Agastache.

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

Monarch Butterfly

I hope you enjoyed a look at a couple of the butterflies in our yard this week.

Join the Nature Friday Blog Hop

We are joining the LLB Gang for their Nature Friday Blog Hop. You should pop over to their blog to see all the other posts.

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Selfie Sunday

Hi everyone. It’s Millie and Walter here.

I love hanging out on the patio.

Laying in the grass is my favorite thing to do.

We hope you are enjoying your Sunday too.

We’re joining The Cat on My Head for their Selfie Sunday blog hop. You should check out the hop to see some of the other selfies. Thanks for stopping by.

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Nature Friday – Butterflies and Bugs

Hi everyone! It’s Millie & Walter here. There aren’t many new flowers blooming in our yard so we thought we would show you some of the creatures that are hanging around the garden.

Hey Millie! What is that bug in the grass?
Where?! He better not crawl on me.

Okay. Maybe there isn’t a bug in the grass that is about to crawl on Millie but we found this katydid on a daylily.

Maybe if I hide under here those pups won’t find me.

I’m feeling brave sitting on this daylily bud.

The next thing we want to show you is the cabbage white butterfly. We always have plenty of these butterflies in our yard every year but they are difficult to capture since they are often moving so fast.

Cabbage White Butterfly on Loosestrife

This next creature is a first sighting at our house.

Long Tailed Skipper

According to Wikipedia the caterpillar of these butterflies are pests of some crops, especially beans. We think the reason we saw this one is that the crop field just a few hundred yards from our house has beans in it this year. Usually they grow corn but have changed it up this time.

I think we found some interesting creatures to show everyone today.
I’m keeping my eyes out for more of those katydids. Did you see how big those pincers were on that thing?

We hope you enjoyed a look at some of the nature in our yard this week.

Join the Nature Friday Blog Hop

We are joining the LLB Gang for their Nature Friday Blog Hop. You should pop over to their blog to see all the other posts.

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Nature Friday – Busy As A Bee

Hi everyone! It’s Millie & Walter here. Thursday we enjoyed our first snow of the season. That is a few weeks later than our average but we aren’t complaining.

We enjoy watching all the critters in our yard.

To warm things up we wanted to show you some of the last bees that were hanging out in our yard a few weeks ago.

Honey bees on the hydrangea

There were just a few hydrangea that the honey bees could enjoy so they were working hard for what might have been their last supper of the season.

The perennial geranium was also still blooming.

The honey bees were also enjoying the geranium that was still in bloom.

We’ve learned to stay away from all those stinging insects.

The bumble bees were lapping up all the nectar they could find from the eupatorium.

Bumble Bees were all over the eupatorium

This is bumble bee heaven.

Here is a little video of the bumble bees in action on the eupatorium.

If you can’t see the video you can go here to see it.

I’m dreaming of the last of the warm fall days.

By now the perennials have all been cut down and the bees are all hibernating (or whatever bees do during the cold weather). We’re watching the snow falling outside and hoping that it accumulates enough to enjoy our first snow zoomies of the year.

We hope you enjoyed seeing some of the bees enjoying the last flowers in our yard.

Join the Nature Friday Blog Hop

We are joining the LLB Gang for their Nature Friday Blog Hop. You should pop over to their blog to see all the other posts.

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Chewy Review – A Pharmacy Review

Ordering from the Chewy.com Pharmacy is easy.

Hi everyone! It’s Millie and Walter here! It’s time for our first March Chewy.com review. This time we aren’t actually doing a review of the product but rather the process of ordering prescription medication from the Chewy.com Pharmacy.

This is a very small box

There was a smaller box inside the small box.

Look! It’s our monthly heartworm preventative Sentinel.

Sentinel is a monthly oral preventive prescription that protects your pet against heartworms, adult roundworms, adult hookworms, whipworms and prevents the development of flea eggs.

We take Sentinel every month but once a year you still need to have a blood test to make sure you are safe to take this medicine. It’s not one of our favorite things to do but we had our tests done together.

I sure hope Millie comes back soon.

We also had physicals and Walter got some vaccines too. They like to take us in the back area one at a time to do the blood draw.

We’re done here!
Open that door.

Our tests were negative so we were ready to leave the vet.

Why did dad go back inside?
I don’t know but I hope he makes it out here without getting poked like we did.

Once dad came back we went home. After we got the all clear from our vet that our heartworm tests were negative we had our mom hop on the computer to order our medicine from Chewy. She said it was super easy.

It only takes a few steps to order:

• Search Chewy Pharmacy for your pet’s medicine and add to cart.
• At checkout, enter your pet and vet information.
• Select an approval method: Chewy can contact your vet, or you can mail the prescription directly to Chewy.
• Place your order.

We chose the approval method of having Chewy.com contact our vet for the prescription. Once they contacted our vet then the vet gave our mom a call to verify that we placed that order. Our vet is very conscientious about making sure someone actually placed the order. Once we tell the vet it’s okay then they call Chewy.com back to confirm that our prescription is good.

It only takes a day or so, depending on if we are playing phone tag with the vet, to get your prescription ordered. As usual with Chewy.com once the order is placed it only takes a couple of days to arrive at our door.

According to the package Sentinel should be given with food so we had ours after our evening dinner.

We take our Sentinel tablets with a side of freeze dried liver.

Was there medicine in there?

I take mine so fast I’m a blur.

We don’t mind taking our pills with a side of liver at all. The tablets are easy to swallow or you can chew them up.

Make sure to mark your calendar for next month’s dose.

We are very happy with how easy it is to order from the Chewy.com Pharmacy and recommend it to all our friends. It is very easy, they have low prices (even lower if you put your prescription on auto fill like we do) and their licensed pharmacists take care of contacting your vet. We give the Chewy.com Pharmacy 8 paws up and our pawrents give it a thumbs up too.

This month we are joining Koru Bear for the Chewy.com blog hop.

Disclaimer: As #ChewyInfluencers we received one box of Sentinel Flavor Tablets for Dogs from Chewy.com to review. We did not receive any monetary compensation for this review and will receive no additional benefits for barking about the product or the company. The opinions in this review are the honest opinions of ours.

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Charlie Gets Crafty

Contrary to popular belief Cindy isn’t the only crafty one in our family. Like many men Charlie prefers to work with wood and use very loud power tools for his creations. We have lived in our home for over 24 years. While our laundry room is not small (approximately 10′ x 7′) it has been pretty stark until recently. In addition to the washer, dryer, ugly utility tub and small freezer there was only a wire shelf for storage.

Ugly utility tub similar to one we had.

Of course I forgot to take any pictures before any of the makeover started taking place but I think you will agree that it looks pretty sweet now.

No more ugly utility sink and now there is a lot of storage.

We had the plumbing for the sink professionally installed but all the cabinets were created by Charlie in his shop in the basement. The Formica sink top was cut from a 6′ long prefabricated top that can be purchased at your local big box store and not an inch of it was wasted because the remaining piece was used to make the cabinet below.

Free standing base cabinet

The laundry room is wide enough that there was also room for a free standing base cabinet opposite the washer/dryer. It is not only great for storage but it is the perfect width for laundry baskets to sit on.

The cabinets are made from maple veneer plywood and solid maple wood with solid maple shelves. The doors have European style hinges and satin finish stainless steel knobs.

Small wire shelf for hanging things

There is still a remnant of the old wire shelf above the dryer to hold hangers and allow for some space to dry small things. I love all the cabinets and Charlie did and amazing job. The only downside to the new cabinets is that when the washer is running it is a bit louder since there is more for the sound to bounce off but nothing closing the door can’t fix.

Were is our water dish?

Now don’t worry Walter your water dish is right where it has always been right next to that boot tray.

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For a Good Cause

Hi everyone.  I just thought I would start by saying thanks for the great welcome messages Nina and I have received lately.  We are very glad to be part of blogville.  Also Nina is very happy to have gotten a date to the Valentines pawty.  The Pittie Packs Brinksey Winksey has asked Nina to the pawty and she is excited to be going with him.

In other news I wanted to tell you about a quilt project that I just put the final touches on.  Last spring I found these really cute embroideries at my favorite source the Embroidery Library called “Animals in Pajamas” and wanted to do something with them.

Sleep Tight Quilt #1

I decided to make a couple of lap quilts in flannel and also decided I would donate them to a cause that helps children.

Sleep Tight Quilt #2

It took a long time to stitch out all 18 embroideries and was especially challenging since I decided to set the blocks on point.  The embroideries are so cute so I will show a few up close.

Dog & Racoon

If you click on the image to see a bigger version you can see that the dogs PJs have fire hydrants on them and the raccoons PJs have trash cans.  Most of the embroideries have these subtle jokes for their pajamas.  The cat below has mice on his jammies.  I quilted them at Jackie Lynn’s on one of her longarm machines and I just love how they turned out.  I stitched stars in the sashing and did loops everywhere else.

Cat & Rabbit

I wasn’t sure which charity I would donate them to until my sister was visiting around Thanksgiving and it dawned on me that she works for a children’s charity.  So I asked her if she thought the quilts were something they could use to raise some money for their organization and she was thrilled at the prospect of using them for a raffle.

The charity my sister works for is called Soar Tutoring.  SOAR Tutoring is a program of Eagle Sports Club that offers low-cost, individualized one-on-one reading tutoring to struggling students on Detroit’s east side.  This is a great cause so I hope a couple of the kids in the program can win them.  I shipped the quilts off to her last week and she was anxious to show them to her co-workers. I love how these turned out and I’m glad that a worthy charity will be able to benefit from them.

Tomorrow I will be at the monthly meeting of the Genesee Valley Quilt Club and will be giving a demonstration on how to make a zippered clutch (like the ones I made as Christmas gifts recently).  Some people are afraid of adding zippers to their sewing projects so I hope to show them that it really is nothing to fear.  After that I will be chained to my sewing machine working on the Fearless Five memory quilt.  I won’t be able to show you any pictures of that until after Sandra has seen it, but I plan on sharing my process later.  I may not be around much to comment on other blogs so I just wanted to let you know I am here and working hard.

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