The sun just couldn't be persuaded to maintain its vigil today. We thought it only fair that since yesterday's rain was relentless, never offering us an opportunity to get out into the wild green of the ravine, the least nature could do to compensate was offer us a full cloudless sky today. But she has her own agenda and doesn't take kindly to offers of help in arranging natural global events.

If she decides the earth should shake, it does, volcanoes to erupt, they do, the moon to draw the tides, it does, hurricanes and tornadoes to howl through the atmosphere and flood the earth, they obey. As for whining over a day lost to rain, well just forget it. Who do you think you are, anyway?

We were given options for the next best and acquiesced with, we would hope, adequate grace. And so it is that we have a quite cool and windy, sometimes-overcast, occasionally sunny, threatening-rain-again Wednesday. No complaints from this quarter. Well, perhaps a few very discreet ones, but they have nothing whatever to do with the weather.

The frustration quotient was fully given over to Immigration Canada today in its impossibly-irritating registration process for ArriveCAN. That's the truly dotty protocol this government of Canada has set up to frustrate and infuriate both Canadians returning from abroad and foreigners wishing to travel to Canada. My efforts at registration this afternoon stalled at the very first steps; email and password.

Not to fret, the program assured me, an email will be sent to enable you to reset your password. Only it wasn't. I waited and I waited and I waited, although patience is not one of my scarce virtues.  Try re-registering? Oh, you're kidding, right? There is a complaint mechanism at one's disposal where a number of listed complaints can be checked off; conveniently for the program, inconveniently for the complainer, no space to lodge a specific complaint. Simmer in silence.

However, we did enjoy a most pleasant trek through the forest trails with Jackie and Jillie. In yesterday's local paper there was a cautionary story. In the city's west end coyotes have been making their presence known in the most horrendous of ways; snatching small pets that are never again seen. One coyote in particular appears to have lost reserve for the presence of humans. At a neighbourhood outdoor gathering a very small dog leaped off its person's lap into nearby shrubbery.

When those present saw a coyote loping off with the ten-pound, two-year-old pup, it couldn't be retrieved. This evidently is a coyote so accustomed to the presence of people it can be seen during daylight hours on streets, in schoolyards. We're in the east end of the city. We've had no word of the presence of coyotes since last winter. During our hike through the trails today, Jackie and Jillie were uncomplainingly kept on leash.