Last night was even colder than the night before. The temperature dipped to -6C, a freezing that aggravated the house no end. So once again last night there were pops and booms signifying expansion/contraction as the roof trusses moaning and groaning in complaint over the winter-grade cold. Loud enough to wake me, but again, not Irving. And this time Jackie and Jillie just ignored the sound intrusion. It isn't hard to imagine in the deep, dark of night's solitude that the roof is preparing to collapse. Doesn't matter how many years have returned to this very same scenario in the past. The sound is loud, and it's alarming. In another month, I'll be ignoring it, too.

It did warm up somewhat as morning crept past a very dark dawn. But 0C was as high as it was prepared to go, today. It  was -2C when we came down for breakfast, and a light accumulation of freezing rain appeared on the deck like minuscule hail fragments. When Jackie and Jillie came back into the house their haircoats were full of tiny frozen little bits of ice.

 

After breakfast, I thought I'd use the extra pasty dough that was excess to the butter tarts I had baked on Friday, and refrigerated for use later in the new week. We'd bought some lovely little Ontario crop pears yesterday that would make a perfect few dumplings to make use of the pastry, I thought. So after cleaning the bathrooms and gathering the towels we'd used upstairs and down for tomorrow's laundry, I prepared pear dumplings.

 

Yesterday's dinner was one of my favourites. I cooked medium-broad egg noodles, drained them and used the same pot to make a cheese sauce with butter, pepper, dry mustard, flour and milk, then melted grated old cheddar into it. I chopped up a few green onions and added them to the cheese sauce, and then in went the drained noodles. I put the first layer of the noodle-cheese into a casserole. Then a layer of frozen green peas, and over that a layer of tinned Sockeye salmon.  The final layer of noodle-cheese, then Panko sprinkled over, and more grated cheese, and then it was baked in a 325F oven for 40 minutes. Not Irving's favourite, but mine. Today he'll have one of his favourites; breaded chicken liver, mashed potatoes, fried onions and asparagus spears.

 

We went off to the ravine just about 2:00 p.m. and it looked more like 8:00 p.m.; dark, with brooding clouds overhead and the threat of mixed precipitation. The howling wind made the 0C seem considerably colder than it was. Once we dipped into the ravine, the forest surrounding us however, the effect of the wind was quite diminished. And though it was dark, and cold, it was not the least bit unpleasant. 

 

The landscape looks a little bleak now that there are few leaves left on the deciduous trees leaving an open look to the forest canopy, but the conifers do their best to take up the green slack; firs, spruce, hillside yews, pine and cedars. We stood still briefly watching a hairy woodpecker hard at work on a tree trunk but the intervening density of the immature trees between the trail and the woodpecker wouldn't permit a photograph of its busy syncopation.

Twenty minutes into our hike, we came across a young man we've seen frequently with his exuberant spaniel, and he wanted to talk, and talk and talk, and Irving as is his wont, was happy to oblige. They discussed weather and geography and in particular the weather-and-geological catastrophe that has overtaken Canada's most beautiful and most geologically varied province. Heavy volumes of rain, even for their rainy season, inundated the B.C. Interior causing mud and rock slides, closing down roads, with flooding necessitating evacuations in a province that was hard hit in the spring by hugely unusual heat conditions causing wildfires, evacuations and the destruction of a town.

 

 

Later, I spoke on the telephone with my sister, while Irving went downstairs to his workshop to do some glasswork. She's four years younger then me, both our birthdays fall in December. While I enjoy robust health, hers has been compromised over the years. She never had full eyesight capacity from childhood on, but she is now considered to be legally blind, the 'talking books' she gets through her membership in the CNIB a lifeline to someone who values reading as a plus in her life. We talk family and national and international affairs, in a long conversation. Neither of us enjoy telephone communication ordinarily but the rare exception is when to speak to one another.

It's so much easier to communicate regularly through the Internet, but she is one of those people who never had an interest in using a computer and exploring communication through that medium. We reassure each other that our children and our grandchildren are fine for the most part, and from there launch into discussions revolving around politics and world affairs...