Looking back from the perspective of our 79 years, it just seems to us as though there has never been a June as unusual as this one. It is surely setting records for cold and high winds. Night-time temperatures are dipping to 7 and 9 degrees, and although the temperature during the day struggles to get up to 15 degrees it seldom seems to succeed. That peculiar and pervasive cold, accompanied by those robust winds doesn't make for the usual late-spring, approaching summer.

Together with rain, which we don't at all mind, since farmland and our own gardens need it, the  unusual-for-the-season combination is puzzling. We don't often need to wear jackets at this time of year, and this June it isn't too wise to venture out without them. We were surprised, rambling through the ravine on our usual daily hike through the forest, to see that the mosquitoes have returned with a vengeance. Just as well we were well covered. Despite the cold and the wind that usually dissuades them, the overnight and morning inundation stimulated them to action.

We decided it was just as good a day as any to drive downtown and pick up a few magazines at the Mags & Fags on Elgin Street. My husband always calls ahead to ensure they've arrived, since often enough the Maine Antique Digest and American Art Review, both of which he particularly favours, fail to arrive on schedule.

It's amazing how much of downtown Ottawa is covered in scaffolding and sheathing, even the National  Cenotaph. The Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings is scaffolded, but the West Block has already been done, I believe, with its refurbishment. The office of the Prime Minister  has worked out of the Langevin Block across from Parliament Hill for years. Presumably when all the reconstruction work is completed on Parliament Hill the plan will be for the PMO to return. Meanwhile, the official residence too is undergoing badly needed and expensive repairs.

Langevin Block

We'd planned to return home via the Eastern Parkway but knew it would be a little more complicated getting on to it, given that Rideau Street and Sussex were full of emergency work crews, responding to the gigantic sinkhole that appeared on Wednesday. That it was construction of the new Light Rapid Transit system deep underground in the area that was responsible for the collapse seems obvious enough. Tons of concrete was poured into the sinkhole to stabilize the area and ensure that building foundations remained stable.

East Block

But the excavation work ongoing under the sinkhole for the LRT had to be temporarily halted when the tunnel began to rapidly fill with water, no doubt from the broken and gushing watermain resulting from the sinkhole. This likely won't be the only or the last time such an occurrence surfaces, given the soil conditions and foundation of the Ottawa Valley; layers of problematically unstable leda clay and sand.

Rideau and Sussex