Mondays are always busy days in this household. Today my husband was putting moulding that he made yesterday around the insert of a door he installed in the upstairs bathroom a few days back. Originally, months ago, he measured and constructed the frame of the door, and then he set about the lengthy business of designing a cartoon, enlarging it, cutting out its constituent pieces, and then putting together a stained glass insert using the pieces as a guide. The insert was completed last week, the door frame installed, the insert placed within the frame, and now he was finishing up the work with the moulding. The last step will be to paint the door.

When he was finished with that, he set about vacuuming the house. While I did the dusting, and washed the floors. All time-consuming. Household rituals. Not the door, but the housekeeping. The most time-consuming is the dusting, going from room to room, dusting furniture and everything that sits on it. Then dry-mopping the hardwood floors. Washing the tile floors is a breeze in comparison, though there are lots of floors to wash, two bathrooms, the kitchen, laundry room and breakfast room.

Then we're done, and it's time to head out to the ravine for a spin around the forest trails with patient Jackie and Jillie. And so it went today, a day of continual overcast, dark skies following overnight and early morning rain, with more threatening. So of course we all wore raincoats and planned if we got caught out in the rain to make it a short circuit through the forest.

That didn't happen, rain didn't come down on us, as it has done several times this week. The trails were more muddy than we've yet seen them, reflecting the amount of rain we've had and the forest's saturation. There was a high wind moving the treetops, sending leaves and pine needles spiralling down. Lately, when we get back home from these jaunts we discover needles in our hair, jackets and trouser bottoms.

Out in the forest our eyes are drawn to the leafmass, mostly still green, but an increasing presence of yellows, pinks, reds and browns, making the landscape look pretty ethereal. Fascinating really, you can find yourself temporarily stiationary, just standing there gazing upward and watching the wind play with the foliage, switching your attention from the dancing leaves to the intense colour variations.

It was a day that seemed to draw more people than usual out for a Monday. But the crowd that came out (not much of a crowd, but a fair number of people with their dogs) were for the most part regular hikers out with their dogs, dogs that were so clearly delighted with the day, romping about energetically, challenging one another to little spurts and starts.

We came across the spectacle of a tree trunk looking as though someone had been inspired to carve it in a pattern. It was a dead ash, its trunk bare of bark. Ash in particular, assailed by the Emerald Ash borer, have been hard hit in the forest, though they're desperately trying to make a comeback. When they're dying ash  tend to shed their bark in great discarded patches. This ash had thrown off its bark a while ago. And what was evident on the naked trunk was the pathways the ash-deadly insect in its larvae stage had left as its larvae steadily killed the tree. 

Some of the dogs, mostly the larger ones, eager to chase the numerous squirrels ran amok in the interior of the forest. Actually, the squirrels themselves were chasing one another up and down tree trunks as though in an excess of excitement over the day, the weather, the fallen cones aplenty. 

At some junctures the ambient light became very dark, and it was toward the end of our junket out in the woods that the sun suddenly remembered its perch in the sky and shoved the clouds aside.