It's beginning of late to look as though we're being settled into a routine not of our choosing but rather imposed on us by forces well influentially behond our own intentions. It's been our daily leisure outdoor treat to get out onto the forest trails in the ravine nearby our home, but this has been an unusual week or two. Actually make that a matter of months, but I'm referring to the latest weather twists affecting what we have become accustomed to.

So much rain continues to inundate this area, and so frequently that our forays onto forest trails have been reduced from daily, to every-other-day, of necessity. That necessity is to shield ourselves from the double whammy of simultaneously-striking cold-plus-rain and a diminishing forest canopy. At the best of times a full forest canopy can serve to keep hikers reasonably dry in a not-too-heavy downpour. Take away the canopy and add increasingly colder temperatures to the equation and you have a formula designed to convince the avid hiker that the day it rains without end and is cold as well is not a day you really, truly want to venture out in.

Yesterday's combination was heavy overcast making for a dark day, but the rain giving us a break between breakfast and dinner, allowing us the opportunity to make a break for the ravine and to enjoy a long, leisurely stroll through the forest. Minus wind. Wind is often the deal-breaker; when it's in evidence the situation becomes starker; it helps to make the rain excessively intrusive and the cold more penetrating.

Any other time yesterday's prevailing weather conditions might have been considered dreary, but in comparison to what we've been getting lately it was downright wonderful. And we weren't the only trekkers through the ravine's trails to come to that conclusion, for Jackie and Jillie and we two came across both slight ravine acquaintances and those hitherto unknown to us.

The first was a very friendly and stick-obsessed eleven-month old yellow Lab carrying a thick but relatively short bough he'd discovered somewhere he was ambulating about on the trails. The person walking him was doing it as a favour for a neighbour who, she told us, had gone to the trouble of taking her puppy born with a serious heart defect, to Colorado for an unusual type of canine heart surgery. The result of which left her dog in far better physical shape with a good prognosis and made its human exceedingly satisfied.

The stick was so large and heavy it occupied a good deal of space in the dog's mouth. From time to time he would deposit it, only to pick it up again possessively. Jackie and Jillie had no intention of claiming it for their own, preferring dainty, slender twigs to chew on themselves so there was no competition. Sometimes the lab would wander off a bit after depositing his stick and though he might wander a good distance he always returned to where he recalled leaving the stick to reclaim it.

The second group was the two women companions whom we occasionally see walking a Golden Retriever and its two companions, two Bernese mountain dogs, all three of them large but complacent and silent, quite unlike our two little poodles whose vociferous voice expressions at the presence of other dogs can get beyond annoying. It is, in fact, quite telling that larger dogs are generally so tolerant of small dogs' annoying habits and proclivities.

Would we exchange Jackie and Jillie for any other companions? Not likely. Like us and like most creatures they have their outstanding features that delight us just as they are also possessed of inclinations -- some breed-specific-- that are beyond annoying. High excitability is one, expressed in various nuisance ways.