After yesterday's bone-chilling ravine walk where, walking along the forest trails we stopped not only to regain our breath after forging uphill in the snow, but to look backward, before us and everywhere surrounding us as the sun illuminated the newfallen snow creating vistas of virginal white perfection. We'd gone out earlier than usual. And although it was a Sunday there were scant few others on the trails, despite the clear blue sky.

My husband had been musing about returning to stained glass landscaping. He had built a door awhile ago but never got around to filling it with a stained glass interior. We've quite a number of his doors in our home. They're colourful and cheerful, another venue to showcase nature. Stained glass lends itself wonderfully to capturing light and transforming colours into variations of themselves. Sometimes it's as though whatever is depicted actually has life in it, and it does, of a sort.

He has plenty of stained glass in reserve, but needed other things, so a drive to the west end of the city was in order to visit his source for all the needed items that go into a stained glass window. This will be his winter project. He always has a winter project. So, off we went. The preferential route is the Eastern Parkway skirting the city centre, and linking to the Western Parkway. It's a scenic route taking us past many areas of Ottawa familiar to tourists.

We drove along Sussex Drive once arrived downtown, past foreign embassies, the Mint and the National Gallery, the Peace Memorial and Byward Market, the Chateau Laurier and the Parliament Buildings. We also passed the site of the newly-opened Holocaust centre and the War Museum. In the spring we will make a trip for the purpose of visiting the Holocaust centre.

On the return trip we passed the External/Foreign Affairs complex where my husband worked as his career concluded. The Ottawa River, we noted, is well on its way in places to freezing over. Before long, avid ice fishers will be out when the ice is deemed thick enough to bear weight, to put up their ice huts and cut holes in the ice to spend hours out there fishing.

My husband selected what he needed to begin. But he will first have to decide what he wants to design and produce the cartoon out of which he will cut and number parts like a puzzle, to be pieced together to finalize what he envisions will be another bit of stained art glasswork.