Busy day today. There's always so much to do. When we were young, only 18 and newly married we had made a pact between us that we would share everything together. And that meant everything. We were both working at the time, and living in a flat on the second floor of an older couple's house. We had the upstairs which was really only a fair-sized bedroom and a tiny kitchen. The other room was rented to a single man. The entire household, owners and renters, shared use of the bathroom on the second floor.

Our rule was that I would clean the kitchen and Irving would look after the bedroom. Although of course we both cross-hatched the arrangement since I also did things in our bedroom like change the linens and did the laundry, and Irving did things in the kitchen like drying the dishes after I washed them following our meals. What I recall of those days was propping a cookbook he had bought me up on the top of the stove while I followed recipes. One day that cookbook caught fire. We still have the cookbook, it's the best one we ever had, though it's singed and the cover is half-off and some pages are loose -- it's well over 60 years of age, after all, and well-used over the years.

I can recall still the frustration I felt when I baked a cauliflower casserole without first pre-boiling the cauliflower. Its large pieces in the casserole  failed to soften as the casserole baked and the end result was pretty inedible. But the piece de resistance that might have thrown me off baking forever was when I withdrew a cherry pie from the oven, and it slipped out of my oven-gloved hands and scattered everywhere. The kitchen floor had just been washed. There was cherry pie filling everywhere, all over the table, the chairs, the floor, the stove. I don't recall whether I cried; I might have....

Today was house-cleaning day; we left it over, taking a holiday yesterday in honour of Thanksgiving. The rooms in the basement that Irving had finished decades ago; a large, all-purpose studio, a study and a bathroom get cleaned every two weeks, though the bathroom is cleaned more often, and today was the bi-weekly cleaning there. Ours is a two-story house with lots of rooms. Irving does the vacuuming and I do the rest.

It also turned out to be a perfectly gorgeous day. Warming up to an astonishing 24C, under clear blue skies and a dazzlingly warm sun. I took some time out to do some sweeping on the front porch, the walkways and the sides of the driveway, sweeping up piles of fallen leaves, spruce needles, crabapples and other woody detritus. It felt utterly divine being out there, and I just love doing that kind of thing.

Finally, out we went with Jackie and Jillie for an afternoon hike in the ravine. With the Thanksgiving weekend over, we hardly expected that we would see a lot of people on the trails, but surprise, although not nearly as many as yesterday, there were still ample numbers. At least there were intervals on the trails where there were no others, although on some trails bottlenecks tend to gather briefly at connecting main trails.

The difference though, was that people were smiling and friendly, fewer aloof, disinterested people, and that does make a difference in your reception of the situation. Seeing scowling people leaves a very poor impression, it's mood-dampening. Jackie and Jillie were free to mosey about wherever they felt like it, as long as they were within sight, and they too ran into friendly dogs. One of the people we know well, out with her sister, told us that her dog had been attacked yesterday by a hostile off-leash husky, while she was walking her dog on leash. It was almost impossible to haul the husky off her dog, a large black lab that tends to officiousness which is why she keeps him on leash.