When the garage called yesterday afternoon while servicing my husband's truck, they said the battery wasn't holding much of a charge any more. My husband, of course, knows this. He intended to buy a new battery, just hadn't yet got around to it. He laughed when the serviceman at the garage asked whether he wanted them to install a new battery.

Well, my husband said, there's nothing to it, and he can do the installation himself rather than pay the $50 to have it done, over the cost of the battery itself. Yeah, laughed the fellow at the other end of the line, it's a real rip-off. So today my husband took out the old battery under the hood, intending to return to Canadian Tire and buy a new replacement battery. Just a few points to unscrew and the battery was out. And then he accidently dropped something he was working with under the hood. And it was less than a simple matter to fish it back out again.

Always something frustrating, irritating, some nuisance to turn an intention slightly awry. As for me, I struggled with a set of flannel sheets, changing the bed linen because it's laundry day. I realize a little tardily that when I wash flannel sheets with a 'hot'-water setting it tends to shrink them. Having done which sufficient number of times they're sized slightly smaller than originally, and pulling the fitted sheets around the mattress corners requires quite some determination. Never too old to learn.

Another cool, damp morning with heavy overcast. Every time I go out to the backyard I take note of all the work left to be done in the garden there. So far, my garden ministrations have taken place at the front of the house.  I still have the back to get done, though it won't be as complicated and as difficult as the front, particularly since I had quite a while ago, cut back many of the perennials that had bloomed like lilies and irises and peonies and roses.

Jackie and Jillie were raring to go, to get out into the ravine and onto the forest trails for our usual tramp-about and so we eventually got ourselves organized. No raincoats today, but snug little sweaters against the cold. No wind, but a damp cold. And off we went, our eyes bedazzled as usual by the sight of the trails heaped with fallen leaves; where poplars tend to predominate among the pines and the spruce, the trails are pure gold.

On the way down the first hill into the ravine we saw a couple of girls in their late teens turn off the main trail toward a minor trail in the opposite direction to ours, and advised them to bypass that one and go on a few yards further where a much safer trail awaited them ending up at the same destination. That trail they began to descend is clay-exposed and slick in this weather and too many people have taken bad falls there, including me. 

On our way back after our circuit when we were heading back up to street level we came across the girls again, and realized they were among the four we used to see in the early spring who daily parked themselves in a cheerful little group on an abutment of one of the bridges at the height of the coronavirus lockdown. We hadn't seen them in months, and now two of the girls had returned to sit once again under the bridge and enjoy the solitude and the opportunity to confide girlish matters to one another.

As for us, the recognition that many of the forest trees were now completely denuded of their foliage was brought home at the sight of dark, bare trunks and boughs, bereft of their colourful costumery. In a sense sad, foretelling how bleak and dark the coming month of November will be until the snow begins to fly. Usually by Remembrance Day, the second week of November snow begins and no doubt that will be the pattern this year.

In the meantime, our eyes were captured again and again by the panoramic sight of the forest, and by discrete close-up landscapes, compelling in their beauty. The sight of the gold and the red, the pink and the orange-bronze leaves has me reaching for my camera repeatedly to capture the beauty as much as possible. 

These days Jackie spends most of his ravine time snout to the ground. We can only assume that there are so many intriguing fragrances he cannot afford to lift his little head for fear of missing any of them. Jillie is far more reasonable on that count, at the very least. She makes up for it by her incessant barking whenever other dogs come along, which hasn't been too frequently.

When we arrived back home again, a cursory look about the garden revealed the hardiness of the begonias planted in the garden urns. I had been unfamiliar with these particular begonias with a pendulous habit and because of our inability to access the plants we usually rely upon when designing our summer garden had planted them directly in the garden beds where they did poorly. Eventually I transplanted a few of them into garden urns where we had originally planted pendulous petunias after they had outgrown themselves.

The begonias that had been absolutely miserable at ground level began to thrive, planted high on plinths, glorying in their new perspective on life and rewarding us amply when all others began to fail in the excess rain and cooler temperatures. Mind, the other types of begonias long familiar to us are still in bloom and doing nicely. Whereas the gigantica begonias, also new to us, have long since passed their glory and ended up destroyed by a succession of night-time frosts.