Really, there are times that bureacracies can be downright confoundingly nonsensical in their decision-making. We could hardly believe it when one of our ravine-walking friends informed us yesterday that the municipality was balking at having the trash collectors pick up the bags neatly set aside at each entrance to the ravine, for regular weekly pick-ups when trash collection takes place.

One member of our far-ranging community has taken it upon himself for the past several years to place garbage containers at each of the ravine entrances/exits for the convenience of people using the forest trails picking up their dog droppings. The incidence of trails being befouled by peoples' companion pets has been greatly reduced as a result of this man's work. He goes to the trouble of buying garbage bags, placing new ones weekly in the trash bins he has provided, monitoring them, placing the filled ones out at street level for weekly pick-up.

For quite awhile when he began doing this he expostulated with the municipality that all it took was one short stop between houses to pick up the bag sitting at the curb ready for pick-up, but which the garbage collectors were leaving. For over a year after the situation had finally been resolved, the collection has gone smoothly. Now the municipality has advised this man, whose work is so altruistic (he has no canine companion of his own), they will no longer pick up the bags.

A decision that smacks of illogic. They suggested the municipality was not obliged to pick up the bags, that it might be the responsibility of another agency like the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority that does no such thing, and whose responsibilities are vastly different, focusing on land and forest conservation and monitoring. The municipality in fact, considers the ravine and its forest interior one of its urban forest 'parks' and performs all maintenance work within it. Using the creek running through the ravine as a storm run-off. 

Well, from wretched decision-making on the part of petty bureaucrats jealous of their wardship yet refusing to maintain logical responsibility, to our own focus closer to home, my husband installed the first of the two stained-glass windows in the shutters he made to fit over the window of our spare bedrooms upstairs. Now his attention will be given to producing its second half.

As for our near landscape, it looks as though we've finally entered winter. The forest landscape reflects an intense winter experience we've been long familiar with. There's some depth to the snow now, at last. The forest looks absolutely ravishingly beautiful, densely clothed in pure white.

There was some wind last night and this morning but it has done little to disperse the generous coating of snow yesterday's snowstorm lavished on the boughs and branches of the forest trees. They remain heavily laden, and even tree trunks are thickly coated reflecting the direction of the wind that blew the storm toward them throughout the night-long and morning-continuation of yesterday's snowstorm.

We were out later this afternoon than we had been yesterday, so the surprising hordes clattering through the forest trails were somewhat reduced, but not entirely. We did, amongst all the temporary hikers, see some of our hiking friends, stopping to talk awhile before carrying on in our separate directions. 

And when we returned home finally, to a steadily darkening atmosphere, the fragrance of the soup I'd put on to begin simmering on the stove for this evening's meal on a cold winter day, greeted us. Jackie and Jillie went berserk as usual, once they were unencumbered of their coats and boots, racing through the house after one another before solemnly gathering after me to urge me to attend to their cauliflower treat.