REALLY!  All those inane messages permeating the media yesterday, alerting people that it's time to adjust their clocks for Daylight Saving. Long past time it was abolished if its original use really was for a once-agrarian society to ensure that farmers had more daylight hours in service to the work that kept everyone else hale and in good order. As in 'Don't forget to set your clocks forward one hour at 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning! 

Spring Forward, Fall Backward, right? Seems so. We're now a fully urbanized and technological society. Farming is now done with all manner of new technologies that aren't inconvenienced by shortened daylight hours. There's likely more giant corporate farms in action now than private, family farms. None of which could care less if we just used one daytime standard.

Can you just imagine some poor souls taking that message literally? Setting their alarm clocks to wake them at 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning so they can set their clocks back? And don't forget the clocks in the kitchen, in the family room, the breakfast room, the bedrooms ... set them back! They'd be the same innocent naivettes for whom telephone and online scams work so marvellously well, separating them from  heir life-savings through any number of illicit schemes posing as legitimate government agencies, savings institutions, energy providers.

I spoke today with our older son's mother-in-law. Yesterday was her 90th birthday, and it was a zinger for her. Her son, who lives in hailing distance from her in rural Nova Scotia and his 22-year-old son took their mother/grandmother for a grand drive to the Annapolis Valley for the day, which she thoroughly enjoyed. Her eyesight is age-impaired but there's enough there to allow her to admire the landscape even as spring has arrived finally in Nova Scotia, unlike eastern Ontario.

No faux agency could pull the wool over her eyes however impaired they now are. Her brain is as it always has been, on overdrive, not just coasting along but continually picking up new and interesting bits of knowledge to cram into her already packed memory files. Fortunate for our son that she also raised one of the most intelligent women we've ever come across...

Here in Ottawa it's another icy day. Full sun, -6C, with the temperature set to fall to -17C tonight. And the wind, what a wind! I've read accounts of explorers in the Arctic and Antarctic and one of the most difficult conditions they encountered, just as on mountain treks to attain lofty summits, is the effect of the wind in those sub-zero temperatures. Although the resemblance is only in passing, the force of the wind and its icy fingers reaching into garments, recalls those passages.

The snow that had begun to melt two days back when the temperature really was springlike has firmed back up and become ice. Conditions that convince quite a few people to give the forest trails a pass but which present no obstacle to anyone wearing boot-cleats, as we were. Jackie and Jillie slither on the ice a bit in their little rubber boots that keep their tender pads from freezing.

 We'd had some snow flurries overnight, but by the time we set out with the puppies for our afternoon trek through the woods there was nothing left of the fresh snow. The wind had whipped it hither and yon and it couldn't be distinguished from the snowpack on the ground. Ah, the ground, no longer pristine white. A combination of snowmelt and fierce wind gusts knocking detritus out of the forest canopy and blasting pine cones out of the pine crowns has created quite the litter.

So the snow is now pocked full of black objects on the overall white. A contrast that appeals enormously to Jackie and Jillie as they swiftly select prize specimens of twigs to gnaw on as we make our way along and through the forest.