The sanitary technicians couldn't figure out how to haul the compost bag out of the compost bin this morning when the sanitation trucks came around this morning to pick up the kitchen waste. It was -6C overnight, and evidently the bottom of the compost bag got soggy and froze to the compost bin. At the same time the garden waste, the last of the leaves and cut-backs in the garden were still standing in their compost bags awaiting pick-up. So Irving gave a good hard few tugs at the frozen kitchen compost bag and up it came. The sanitary engineer had emptied most of the kitchen waste, but decided to leave the bag with whatever was left. 

It's now plumped down inside the garden waste compost bags awaiting pick-up. Didn't take that much effort, but then Irving isn't a professional sanitary technician, just a practical minded fellow who saw a solution to the impossible task of emptying garbage into a garbage truck. Irving is the quintessential Jack-of-all-Trades, though he made his professional livelihood as a government bureaucrat.

Not to denigrate garbage collectors; it's a tough job, out in all seasons, going house-to-house, street-to-street, hauling up and emptying heavy, awkward containers of discards and waste. One has to be fit and able to countenance the stench that invariably accompanies the job, along with handling slops and other unmentionables, coveralled, gloved and ready every day.

It took us awhile last year to get accustomed to the fact that school buses no longer took their usual routes picking up children for school, during the first, frightening wave of the coronavirus. We had been the day-care givers for our granddaughter until she was nine years old and the daily routine of driving her to a preschool, then picking her up, volunteering to help look after the children because it was a co-op, is familiar to us. As is walking her down the street once she was a little older to wait for the school bus pick-up to a school about a fifteen-minute walk from our house, then doing the reverse in the afternoon.

         

At our age then and having gone through the routine with our own three children, until she was old enough to attend a pre-school, we used to haul her with us into the ravine in a carrier before she began walking on her own, reverting to hauling her in a sled in the winter months. When she was old enough to get around on her own then she did just that on the woodland trails. And no day could be complete without a visit to a local park and playground, both within handy walking distance of the house. So when she finally was old enough to attend school full-time it spelled real relief for us.

Now children are back at school once again. As we drove out to do our food shopping this afternoon, we stopped for school buses unloading children at the end of the school day, a parent or a care-giver there to take stewardrship of young children, the older ones making it home on their own.

It was a pleasant change when we were out in the ravine earlier in the day with Jackie and Jillie. A cold day of -2C when we were out in the forest, fairly heavily overcast but no wind, mitigating the cold. And from time to time the sun squeaked through the clouds, illuminating the landscape, no longer contending with foliage of the forest canopy shielding it from penetrating down through the forest.

Jackie and Jillie are good and snug in their little winter jackets, for now. It won't be until it gets much colder and snow begins to pile up that they'll need little boots to protect their tiny tender paws from cold. Without the boots they're in real pain when exposure is any longer than ten minutes without protection.  Already, today, we could feel the difference underfoot, the forest floor icy-firm as frost set in as a result of a succession of -6C nights.