Now we really do know it's winter. We look outside the house to the landscape beyond and everything is deeply ladled in white. Including the street in front of the houses. There, the snow is good and thick even though the street plows come by after a storm. And finally, we don't have merely inches of accumulated snow on lawns, but feet of acquired snowpack, and it will only grow from here on into deep winter. It's just taken longer than usual this year.

Last night the temperature began dropping as a new weather front entered. We've been mired in mild weather for quite some time, and the days have been heavily overcast. With the colder temperature sunny skies become the norm. And that's just what we've ended up with, today. Clear blue skies, the heat of the sun burning through the windows of the house, making the interior temperature comfortably warm.

Jackie and Jillie position themselves at the sliding glass doors leading to the patio where the afternoon sun sends its dazzling beams of golden warmth onto the deacon's bench along the wall and hitting the little dog bed positioned beside the bench. The dog bed is Jillie's favourite sunbathing spot and Jackie prefers to perch himself up high on the deacon's bench. Jillie gets overheated and eventually leaves the bed to clamber under the table in the family room to cool off. Jackie never seems to get too warm, he just gets a little bored and eventually moves off the bench.

House cleaning today so I was hours at it, ending with washing the floors. While I'm washing floors the puppies know those areas are off limits. But when I back out of the breakfast room, the last floor to be washed they get all excited because they know I'll be bursting out of there into the family room on my way to dumping the pail of soapy water as I make my way to the powder room and then the laundry room and they trot after me, then follow me upstairs while I change.

And then it's time to leave the house for a leisurely tramp through the ravine. We'd be a lot later leaving if Irving didn't take it upon himself to vacuum the house, saving me the time it takes him to do that. So off we went on a windy, -8C afternoon, snugly dressed for maximum warmth because the sun after all, barely penetrates the forest interior.

Despite the wind, there is ample snow left on the trees and the landscape still looks divinely lovely. We're anticipating another snowfall on Thursday, though no word yet on how much we might get. It's an interesting phenomenon that the camera captures; from the time we enter the ravine and begin our daily ramble to the end of the circuit that takes us back up to street level and the return home, the light changes become evident through the photographs taken.

The first photographs have a lot more light than the later ones; and while the earlier photos display with a certain level of detail and clarity, the later ones become fuzzy and indistinct; changes that are gradual and hardly noticeable as dusk moves in and accelerates, but the process captured by the photographs.

The sky remained blue, a lovely light cerulean visible through the forest canopy, but we also saw the sun begin to set, a luminous nimbus seen as it blazes through the trees in the distance as though waving goodbye to the day.