Quite a crowd of squirrels on the porch this morning, coming and going constantly, jostling and chasing one another as though there weren't enough peanuts to go around for everyone. They're decidedly more frantic now as inherited and lived memory kicks in warning of impending hard times with winter's approach. The raccoons are coming around now during the night singly. All the kits and juveniles are now fully independent and packs of five and six at a time no longer congregate on the porch at night.

We're eating differently now, too. Just like the wildlife feeling the need for more substantial meals to cope with the extra energy it takes to face the icy wind, cold and damp temperatures. Last night we had oven-baked fish 'n chips with a salad, the night before breaded chicken livers with mashed potatoes. What used to be called 'stick-to-your-ribs meals.

We weren't out at all yesterday other than close around the house, in the backyard. Rain fell constantly and too heavily to venture out; neither Jackie and Jillie nor we would find any pleasure in defying the wind bursts hurling rain about. So we reluctantly gave our daily hike through the forest trails a pass yesterday; little other option available to us. Had we been inclined to get out in the wee hours of the night to try to witness the eclipse of the moon, that too would have been foiled, hidden from us, given the stacked dark clouds in a darker night sky.

No more rain today, though. Instead we were given the gift of light snow flurries in the morning. The temperature sat at 2C, and snow was coming down. Yesterday the temperature wasn't able to rise above zero, and we had unrelenting rain. It's a reflection of what the upper atmosphere was like, apparently.

In fact, today gave us just about every kind of weather condition. Even the sun popped out occasionally, if briefly. The cold seemed even more frigid than the temperature gauge informed us, because the atmosphere was also saturated. When we did get out, the wind followed us persistently and miserably until we entered the ravine, when it became muted.

Earlier in the day Irving had driven the car over to the garage which had finished with the truck, leaving the car for an oil change and anti-wnter-salt-oiltrell treatment. The garage had called suggesting he keep their loaner car, and once they were finished with the car, they would call, and Irving would drive their car back to the garage to pick up his own car, job completed.

In between we looked after our usual household routine. Irving  raked up newfallen leaves in the backyard, then lined the garage floor with old newspapers to soak up the dripping oil from the undercarriage of the treated vehicles. I baked coconut cupcakes and put together a whole-wheat bread dough then started a chicken soup for dinner.

And then we took ourselves out to the ravine, padding Jackie and Jillie with their warm winter jackets and heavy-purpose harnesses to trot off for what we thought would be no more than the usual hour-and-a-half circuit, but turned out to be much longer. As we literally sloshed through the sodden trails, we kept coming across old friends with their dogs, one after another. Everyone has so much to talk about; from items in the news, to the weather, to personal anecdotes.

The dogs line themselves up next to Irving and he doles out the anticipated cookies, then they mill about and wait for the irritating humans to stop jawing, so they can get on with their forest adventures. The forest floor resembles a bog, or a wetland, now. It had already been in a state past-saturation, with ponds of rainwater making a permanent home where the soil should be dry.

Now, the ponds have expanded, they're longer, larger, deeper, and new ones have popped up. The trails haven't fared too much better, all the fallen foliage that had once sat so deep, dry, colourful and crackly on the trails have become a soggy, slippery mess. The trails are still more negotiable, however, than they were after heavy rains when we first came upon them decades ago. Then, they were true forest trails; narrow and topped with leda clay. Since then, they've expanded in width considerably, thanks to the heavy equipment brought in to ameliorate and reconstruct collapsed hillsides, and the gravel deposited over the years so a good boot grip could be maintained on ascents and descents, though much of it in the first several years simply washed down the hillsides in heavy weather.

We did see the sun come out for the space of an eye-blinks cheerily blinking back at us as it began to set on the horizon. We saw slightly more of a return to snow flurries and ice pellets, both of which quickly melted to join the accumulated moisture left by yesterday's marathon rain event.