It's best to balance the quality of meals, so that they're fairly well equal in terms of content and nutrition, but there are some days when a meal tends to be on what we call the 'heavy' side, so we decide the following day to have something 'lighter' for dinner. And since Monday we shared a roasted Cornish game hen, noodle pudding and spinach, we thought it would be fitting to have dairy on Tuesday. On occasion I prepare a meal my husband is fond of and me not so much, and yesterday it was cheese blintzes.

 A simple enough meal actually, the blini themselves contain only four, salt, egg and milk. And when they're done, placed on a nice clean tea towel, they're filled with a combination of cottage cheese, sugar, cinnamon, butter and egg yolk. Folded over, they can be refrigerated if they're prepared earlier in the day as I did, so that at dinner time all that's required is to fry each in butter, flip over, fry the opposite side, then serve with anyone's choice of sour cream, maple syrup or apple sauce. With a salad and fresh fruit dessert, it makes a light and satisfying meal. Even for me.

Tonight, it's a stir-fry with onion, garlic, mushrooms, bell pepper, snow peas and bean sprouts. With soy/garlic-marinated beef strips stir-fried separately and all of it over a bed of rice. Strawberries for dessert. That's the kind of meal I can bear repeating often, say every two or three weeks. But I prefer the main vegetable to be broccoli, while my husband's preference is bean sprouts.

We've been enjoying sun today.Which means the large windows of this house have absorbed a lot of warmth from the sun and light flooding into the house interior. The precise opposite of what occurs when we have heavily overcast days of which we've had more than enough of late. It's a treat not to have to turn on lamps or overhead lights during the day when the house is well enough lit naturally. As well as beyond mere comfort when the house has been warmed by the sun.

It's also been windy and a trifle cooler, with the high set of -2C, very well tempered by the sun. I suppose we needn't have been too surprised to see that we had quite a bit of company to come across on the forest trails. We're in a phase three pandemic lockdown, so people have nowhere else to go. The new rules are no more than  25 people on any municipal skating rink, and masks recommended. As for walking trails (not the forest, but area parks), and parking lots the same strictures apply.

There's no mystery about people wanting to get out for fresh air and exercise on a beautiful winter day, and there are places that can readily accommodate a larger presence; the ravine in the community where we're located is one of them. Despite an increase in trail hikers today, most of our circuit went off without encountering anyone else. People tend to congregate in main areas, where conjunctions of major trails are located, and particularly close to entrances to the ravine scattered throughout the community.

The sun doesn't really penetrate the forest interior very much. We can, however, see its effect high up  on the masts of trees on the upper reaches of the forest canopy. The dusky atmosphere that normally prevails in the interior of a forest is lightened by the presence of unimpeded sun, able to throw long shafts of bright light through the canopy in various places. The landscape of the forest becomes transformed yet again when the ambience is bright, giving us yet another view of what we're familiar with, yet being exposed to subtle differences, greeted time and again with fresh perspectives.