For a smile as wide as a country sunrise
Hello everyone! Another week has gone by already and here we are in the middle of July. Summer is going by so fast. Often our weather changes to fall temperatures around the middle of August, which is only a month away. That’s a terrible thought. However, some years summer can last until about mid September.
That doesn’t happen too often though, but I like to dream. It has turned quite cool this week which will help the forest fire situation a bit. There are over 50 fires burning here in our area of the province. There are over 50 fires burning in our neighboring province as well. Thousands of people have had to evacuate their homes once again.

Some of those people had just returned from an earlier evacuation, and now they are going again. It is bad like this right across western Canada, but even one of our eastern provinces is starting to have serious problems with forest fires and evacuating people. The largest fire in our district is nearly 500,000 acres (almost 200,000 hectares) in size now.

It is further north than us and threatening an entire indigenous community of over 4,000 people. Thankfully, in this small area where I live, we have had quite a lot of rain. We are supposed to get more rain this week. Today’s high is only supposed to be 66F (19C), last night it dropped to 48F (9C), a little too cool for summer. It might start to warm up again next week.
Summer is too short to have such cool temperatures. But, it could be worse, so guess I shouldn’t complain. Muffin is enjoying the cooler weather though, so there is always a plus side. I am showing some pictures today of the smoke from forest fires that we had last week. It wasn’t as bad as it has been, but it was bad enough.

I spent my days coughing and sneezing. Amazing how quickly things change. Two weeks ago the birds were still singing loudly each day, now most of them are silent. They are busy now with teaching their newly flying young how to forage for themselves.

Hard to believe that in only about 3 weeks some of our birds will be starting to fly south. The flowers on my balcony are doing great right now. My indoor plants are doing well also and I have repotted most of them now. All photos taken from my balcony, it was sunny, we just couldn’t see the sun. Well, I hope you all have a great day and God bless!
Steve and Muffin.
©2025 Steve McLeod.
Those fires are concerning
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Yes, so many thousands of people are affected and right now it looks like it will get worse yet.☹️🙀
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So sad
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