Today, at 27C, light wind and full, searing sun won't be the hottest day this week. Irving finally shut off the furnace and adjusted the air conditioner to come on if needed. And brought a few fans up from the basement. He was out, first thing after breakfast this morning, to water the garden urns, pots and beds. Everything is getting parched. And exposure of any duration directly to the sun is enervating. For humans and other animals and the vegetation we're surrounded by.

We were out actually, earlier in the day, to do our grocery shopping. Wednesday isn't normally a shopping day, but yesterday morning, which was, passed by without our getting to the supermarket. The night before I'd awoken suddenly feeling nauseated and hit with a bout of diarrhoea, feeling like death warmed over, after retching. The next morning, fine, but tired, so no shopping expedition. Instead, we slept in a lot longer than usual, then we took a fairly long hike through the ravine in the afternoon.

There are strange things happening under the midnight sun and all I wanted was a good night's sleep, not looking for a pot of gold. We've both been hit by some kind of bug, but we're recovering. We're getting our appetites back, and feeling a whole lot better. And then we took Jackie and Jillie out this afternoon for their usual round through the forest trails. We walk them up the street the short distance it takes to reach the ingress point to the ravine and the forest below, then remove their leashes and they're free to poke about.

Any time they sense other dogs are around they're alerted long before we see or hear their approach. This time it was, for them, the familiar smell/sight/sound of a group of five, sometimes six dogs that are regularly taken through the ravine by a dog walker we've come to know the past several years. They're all kinds of dogs, from a tiny dachshund to a small collie and several Labs. All of them had been in the creek and were happily dripping, relieved momentarily of the heat, feeling well refreshed.

Poodles are also supposed to be water dogs and our little miniature poodle Button was an enthusiastic water dog, but we never allowed her to indulge in the creek, because once when she was young, her dew claw had been severed by a broken bottle that some brilliant teen had tossed into the creek. We no longer see discarded bottles or cans, but our two don't go into the creek because they have no wish to.

Eyes peeled for sight of Jack-in-the-Pulpits, we weren't disappointed. The earlier-to-appear ones are now fully formed, and later specimens are just now beginning to erupt. The trilliums have had their glory days and are now fast fading. But the lilies-of-the-Valley crowding the base of tree trunks have proliferated and many are now in bloom.

Although we had more than adequate shade-shelter from the searing rays of the sun, the signal is there that henceforth on such warm days a necessary part of our gear apart from harnesses and leashes is a water bottle. Sometimes Jackie and Jillie are thirsty, more often they're not, but it's best to have one on hand on these energy-depleting days when they dash about despite the heat, then have their tongues hanging out.

We were surprised to come across a little clump of flowers far more familiar to us in our spring garden than on the forest floor. As sometimes happens, seed, either carried by the wind, or within the food-waste of a bird falls, takes root, and the forest welcomes and nurtures a visitor. Sometimes those visitors take up permanent residence, but more often they don't last past a season. For several seasons we've seen tomato plants on a part of one of the trails struggling to produce fruit.

For forest denizens like the black cherry trees whose habitat this forest is, it's time to flower, and they're doing so generously. The forest understory also plays host to many kinds of dogwood shrubs and they too are beginning to form their flower heads. A hike through the forest in any season is never a bore, there is always something to see or hear that is unusual, drawing attention and speculation.