At around half-past five yesterday, Irving was contemplating this morning's breakfast and thinking he was a little tired of having pancakes Sunday morning for breakfast. The perfect time, he thought, to head out to Farm Boy which had bought the Rideau Bakery franchise when it went out of business and now sells all the traditional Jewish breads that the Rideau Bakery was famous for, in Ottawa. The timing is critical since if it's a round dinnertime, most people would be ensconced at their dinner table, not gallivanting around doing shopping.

Uppermost in his mind was to procure, beyond rye bread and bagels, challah. He yearned for French toast for a change and as anyone knows, without challah French toast just isn't as good as it can be. So, French toast it was, this morning. And since Jackie and Jillie always get a little dish of whatever we're having special for breakfast, they too appreciated it muchly.

Weather here in Ottawa can get a little tedious too, in winter. It's the season we welcome in late November when it storms onto the scene, shoving fall out of the way, with 'surprise' snowstorms, but it's also the season that has the impression that it's the only season worth caring about. When it gets old and hoary and cranky it refuses to even recognize spring.

And the fact it, we kind of forget what spring looks like, too. It certainly doesn't resemble the -5C temperature we had today, though it's the 'mildest' day we've had all week. Nor the rampant wind that makes any temperature below freezing feel like we've been transported to the Antarctic. And let's not even linger to think about the piles of snow accumulated over winter because if we do, we'll wonder what spring will do with it all...

 But there are unmistakable signs other than those that spring really is nigh. Take the sun, for example, it's riding much higher in the sky these days. Staying in view up there a lot longer too, giving us longer daylight hours, warming up the interior of this house with its heating rays, as a bonus. And even when we head out into a mean wind in freezing temperatures and tread on layer upon layer of snow, we can 'feel' spring, and 'smell' spring.

Moreover, we're taking bets that the trees and the fauna in the forest can, too. It's this time of year that we begin to see robins hanging around the creek. We had seen one yesterday, and today there was a veritable parade of them, celebrating their anticipation of spring. At least a dozen robins were flitting about one particular area close to one of the bridges, where if we're going to see them, it'll be there.

Irving theorizes that the area of the creek where we see the robins is their preferred late-winter hunting grounds. It's downstream slightly from a set of 'rapids' churning up the water as it flows through the floor of the ravine. The turbulence, he says, lifting up sediments and perhaps even live aquatic creatures that the robins swoop down to capture. Not as kingfishers do, but snapping minuscule plankton up from the surface of the water before it has the chance to settle back down again.

None of this is of any interest to Jackie and Jillie. They're focused on trotting along the trails, distracted only by the occasional sight in the distance of others doing the same. It's not the humans they have any interest in, but their canine companions. To whom our two rascals are sometimes gracious as long as they know the other dogs, or barking-nasty in those instances where another dog is new to the trails or to their acquaintanceship.