Our daughter, whose 6-acre property is located 100 kilometres west, on the edge of the Canadian Shield, from where we live, experiences greater weather extremes than we do. In the summer months that's all very well. In the winter months, not so much, given how weather impacts the safety and security of normal highway travel and domestic heating costs as well.

Yesterday, the day-time high struggled to rise above minus-20-degrees Centigrade. She took her dogs for a quick morning walk, but it became abundantly clear, quickly, that they weren't so much enjoying the walk as enduring it. As the wind picked up in the afternoon and the temperature was unable to rise at all, an afternoon walk went by the boards.

As for us, our day-time high soared all the way to minus-18-degrees, with wind whipping about the ambient snow, albeit under bright, sunny skies. Given the unalterable fact of age and energy, neither our two little dogs nor I are now able to jaunt along at a good enough pace to keep warm in such icy temperatures.

So when it's this cold out, even if we put boots on Button and Riley to protect their tender pads from freezing up, the boots make it difficult for them to gain traction going uphill, necessitating that we each pick up one of them, and the additional burden for me, trudging uphill in snow, becomes extremely tiring, slowing us down, and making us even more vulnerable to the effects of the cold.

So, on these very chill days, we're now agreed, there's little point in pushing ourselves for our usual daily ravine jaunts. Missing out on the beauty of the landscape, the pleasure of being out there, but that's life.