I hadn't quite made up my mind how I'd use leftover rice I had cooked a few days earlier and left in the refrigerator until I decided, but last night it struck me that we hadn't enjoyed rice pudding for breakfast for awhile, and the rice would be perfect for that. So this morning I placed the rice into a small covered pot and into it put twice the volume of milk to rice after heating up the milk first. Then I set the rice to simmer in the milk for a half hour while we showered before breakfast.

When I came downstairs, the rice had absorbed all the milk and I put more in, along with a few tablespoons of sugar, tons of cinnamon and raisins, and let it simmer a bit longer while I sectioned oranges and peeled bananas to preface the pudding. At the table more, much more milk, cold this time, was mixed into the rice pudding in our bowls, and it was absolutely lovely. I should prepare it more often for our morning meal.

A mild morning, just hovering at 0C, overcast and very windy. Today is cleaning day so we spent hours cleaning the house, each to our separate tasks. When we were  young and first married and had our very own flat in a house owned by a family friend, we divided the housework. We were only 18 at the time. Irving did the cleaning up in our bedroom-sitting room and I did the kitchen, a very small kitchen to be sure, but our very own (rental). 

When we eventually bought a little bungalow of our own north of the city, things shifted a bit so that all the outdoor things that had to be done were his bailiwick and the indoor mine. We didn't really plan anything, it's just the way things worked out naturally, it seemed to us. We were both working and commuting daily from Richmond Hill where our house was, to downtown Toronto where our jobs were. Four years later our first child came along, then two others.

I became a stay-at-home mother, but when Irving arrived home after work we still shared things that had to be done, mostly relating to the children; changing diapers, bathing them, playing with them. Now we share our attention between two little poodles. Speaking of which, little Jillie was under-the-weather today, and didn't feel like having her breakfast.

Whenever we took her out to the backyard she would wend her way over piles of snow over to an Alberta spruce, and pull the needles off. Some dogs look for grass when they have upset stomachs, Jillie always preferred the small needles of an Alberta spruce and it seems to work for her. In mid-afternoon we set off for the ravine, and she was anxious enough to go.

By then the sun was full out and the temperature had dropped to -5C, the wind whipping tree masts about. Last night's rain had left puddles of melted snow close to the street catch-basins which left us wondering why at this temperature they hadn't frozen, as we skirted them. The snow that had been loose and lofty yesterday was now covered with a thin crust of ice. No complaints, it made progress on the trails in the forest more efficient.

Before we'd left the house there were a few episodes of snow flurrying in the wind. Oddly enough that snow was coming down even though the sun was blazing its way across the sky. An odd intersection of sun and snow that we occasionally see in the summer too, when sun and rain appear together in the choreographed surprise of an unexpected weather treatment.

Because of the rain having melted some of the snowpack, the creek was fully open and burbling its businesslike way downstream, swollen from the melting snowpack. All was still, otherwise. No one else out on the trails but ourselves; the entire ravine at our appreciative disposal. Jackie and Jillie feel that to be the natural order of things.

When we arrived back home Jillie felt quite recovered and was anxious to have her afternoon treat. Today that consisted of cut-up green beans, red bell pepper, halved grape tomatoes and strawberries; colourful and absolutely to their liking. It was all gone in a snap. And to celebrate that all's well, brother and sister chased one another around the house until it was nap-time.