One of those days when everything goes right. Routine is partly responsible. We respond to the day on auto-pilot. But on the way there are unscheduled things to take your notice, all of which add to the richness of the day. A day that has turned out dry, breezy and occasionally sunny, with a beautiful white-puffy cloud-filled sky. Not too hot to keep all the  house windows fully open. No fear of rain penetrating the open windows today. 

Irving was busy trying to figure out what's wrong with the electronics of one of the garage door openers. The mechanics work fine from inside the house, but don't respond from the outside. So he's read the manual several times and tried several recommendations and so far no solution. So who claims that even perfect days don't come with the occasional irritation? In which case, you just set it aside since it is, after all, not terribly relevant to life.

And he had other things to do, like the Friday chore of vacuuming. Since fresh blueberries are available in abundance at good prices, a blueberry pie was on the agenda for dessert at dinnertime tonight. While I washed the breakfast dishes, the pie filling prepared itself on the stove under a low heat where sugar, cornstarch, water and berries busied themselves into a thick and fragrant stew only lacking almond flavouring.

Jackie and Jillie meandered around the garden with us for awhile, and then we took ourselves off to the ravine for our daily jaunt through the forest trails. Once again, few others out besides ourselves on this most perfect of summer days. There were several meet-ups with dogs whose expectant stance Irving responded to, pleasing Jackie and Jillie mightily, since if other dogs merit cookies, so too do they.

We decided to take a little-used trail for a change to round out the first three-quarters of our circuit. And that diversion also pleased the puppies since they feel excited over any deviation in the trail system they're most familiar with. When we emerged to come out at the location of the last bridge fording the forest creek they were prepared to mount it but we had other ideas and led them off toward another trail.

This one also little-used, so much so that the narrow trail has been overgrown by saw-toothed grass, now as tall as I am, interspersed with ferns to form a bracken including cowvetch and newly-blooming Queen Anne's lace, alongside tall, blooming fleabane and other sedge grasses. Among them a growing colony of wild parsnip, best to avoid touching. 

From the far side of the creek we've made out over the past week flowering black-eyed Susans in growing proliferation. And it was those delightful flowers, blooming earlier year by year, that we particularly wanted to get some closeup views of. And didn't we? They're breathtakingly beautiful arrayed in a vast stretch of overgrown meadow within the forest proper. Their dark eyes glint off the sun and their bright yellow petals reflect the sun.

To approach them we had to wade through waist-high and taller grasses teeming with little no-see-ums that stung, but we plowed through regardless. There too the path that area youngsters used to keep relatively clear by frequent visits to the creek to try to net goldfish has been abandoned. And it, like the connecting trail to the meadow has been densely overgrown.

The effort to get closer to the flowers was worth the while. The sheer abundance of those floral treasures treated the eye with its variations, where some of the flower centres approach bulls-eye in colour intensity and fewer yet among them flaunt triple rows of frilly petals, a treat for the eyes that want to capture the vision in perpetuity, and with the help of a camera, the capture is possible.