Nature is truly the original drama queen. Today is the penultimate day of November 2022. Once it's gone it will never return. It awaits the arrival of tomorrow. And tomorrow will be a rather inconvenient weather day, heralding the imminent entrance of December, with another three weeks to go before winter's official arrival. We thought, back a week and more ago that winter had arrived early. We already had a sizeable initial snowpack, the weather was unseasonably cold and windy and we readied ourselves for a cold and snowy winter.

 We've gone backward, however, with December following a day abnormally mild at 9C, complete with heavy rain. A blah day in the works for tomorrow, in other words. So we're being put through the weather-wringer, a petulant display by Mother Nature, obviously fed up with all the climate change complaints. She is going out of her way to impress upon us mere humans that she's in command here, not us.

 

Our morning began with a brief absence from home, leaving Jackie and Jillie in mourning mode, as we drove to the supermarket to get our weekly shopping done. Last week we were later than usual doing the shopping, timing it to synchronize with taking Jackie and Jillie to the groomers. The timing is just right; we leave them for an hour-and-a-half and that's about as long as it takes to get the shopping done. We were slightly taken aback that there were so many people crowding the supermarket.

Today, hours earlier, the store was almost equally crowded. Enough so, that from time to time patience must be exercised to wait while someone monopolizes a shelving section you're interested in, or positions their shopping cart injudiciously in a manner so as to make it impossible to reach a product that is part of your usual shopping list. 

 

Frozen turkeys were out n a large refrigerated case and a group of shoppers milled about the section where they lay, examining the birds for size and price. Local cranberries were on sale, and for the first time I can remember, shelled Brazil nuts. Lettuce, because of the poor weather conditions in California along with infected crops that has led to a shortage, is now an astronomical price. We'd heard that 3 packaged heads of Romaine hearts were priced at an astonishing $16. Today they were priced at $8.99. But there was Ontario greenhouse-grown Boston lettuce in a clamshell, for a mere $2.95. Lettuce just happens to be the one fresh vegetable I could readily forego.

We left for our afternoon hike through the woods with Jackie and Jillie just a few minutes after three. As we emerged from the house, Jillie saw a dog on the street she's familiar with and began barking. Almost immediately, another dog burst on the scene, one we're quite familiar with from the ravine. And we wondered why on earth he was racing about off leash, his person nowhere in sight.

As we made our way back up the street we came across that person just emerging from the ravine in quite a hurry, and she told us that while they were on their hike, not far from the street, her dog heard Jillie barking, and linking her bark to the treats Irving always hands out, he broke away and raced for the street to look for cookie treats. And was duly rewarded.

As relatively early as it was in the afternoon, a dense, low cloud cover ensured that as soon as we entered the forest we were immediately engulfed in low light, dusk already setting in at a few minutes after three. By the time we exited the forest trails just over an hour later, dusk was giving way to the dark of early night. Without the relieving aspect of a snow cover, it's pretty hard to take. When we looked up toward the sky we were surprised to see that the clouds had moved out and the moon had moved in.