Andrea drove Irving over to the Canadian Tire garage to pick up the truck he had left for servicing the day before. So he got a ride over,  unlike yesterday when he walked back home. He took the truck in for normal servicing, but also because he was concerned at a back-end rattling that began a week earlier. A clamp had to be replaced, holding the muffler and the 'check engine' light nuisance is now gone, a part replaced, something to do with the catalytic converter, so he was enormously pleased.

That done, we all decided we'd go off for an early afternoon hike through the ravine. We were really surprised to see how wet everything was in the forest. Hard to believe it was the result of the rainfall that erupted, surprising us just after Irving had finished barbecuing chicken drumsticks for dinner last night. The amount of rain was prodigious, and it was sudden, but it lasted for no more than an hour or so, unlike most of the rain eruptions and thunderstorms we're becoming accustomed to as a daily event, in this new version of summer.

Could be the forest has reached its saturation point. The stream was running full, but the trees weren't dripping, and they shouldn't have been, since today dawned bright and sunny, although by the time we left for our hike, clouds had moved back in. It was breezy and the temperature rose to no more than 24C, with no rain in the forecast for today. But we'll see.

I'm planning to prepare Moroccan cous-cous to accompany grilled steaks Irving will be doing on the barbecue for this evening. And fully expectant that although there's no rain in the forecast, it will materialize nevertheless once Irving sets dinner in motion. He rolls the barbecue under the deck canopy, so it keeps dry there, but it's a nuisance having to cope with the rain.

We saw a few interesting fungal specimen that are now beginning to erupt, thanks to the overwhelming dampness and the drenched forest floor. Among them a spread-out colony of amanita muscaria; they always tend to pop in the late summer months. We've not yet seen any bright red, deep orange and even purple fungi that we've seen in previous years and are so intriguing in their shape and colour. Nor yet the pale blue that I don't much care for; reminds me of a corpse. What was unusual, though, was a jelly-like colony of bright red fungal matter we came across nestled deep in the rotting carcass of an old tree trunk.

Yesterday, we had seen a just-emerged Monarch butterfly land on a leaf, and begin spreading and folding its wings, still damp from its birth out of a cocoon on a milkweed plant. Today it was a Black Admiral, but it chose to land on the trail itself, pumping its wings rhythmically; open, close, open, close to dry them and begin life from a caterpillar to a beautiful butterfly.

We were also surprised to come across an old patch of pussy toes, a member of the wild aster family that we see nowhere else in the forest, but on the half-way rise of a trail ascending a long hill in the forest. Jackie and Jillie aren't much interested in identifying wildflowers, but their enthusiasm knows no bound over the countless raspberries, thimbleberries and blackberries that Irving assiduously plucks for them.