After yesterday's busy day it was a quiet and comfortable relief to sit down to dinner. For a change I decided to make a roast beef. So I surrounded a small eye-of-round with fingerling potatoes and let the oven do its magic. I had pre-cooked beets to make it easier to peel them, and then sliced and honeyed them, adding lemon juice afterward, to serve with the sliced roast and potatoes.

Beets are such a magical bright red colour. Beautiful to look at, but a nuisance to clean up from. Jackie and Jillie appreciated their little share of the roast and although they love vegetables we kept the beets and potatoes to ourselves. They'd already had their salad, in any event. Whatever is left over of the beef will be slivered and fried up with lots of onions for sandwiches.

By the time we shut off our bedside reading lamps it was half-past one. Next thing I knew, Irving was dressed and had just returned from shovelling out snow on the backyard walkways for Jackie and Jillie. We were early because it's shopping day. Snow was coming down so heavily vision sightlines were impeded. By the time we left Jackie and Jillie in the house as we prepared to drive to the supermarket snow was swirling about so thickly it was almost a white-out.

The roads were slippery with new snow; without winter ice tires I don't know how anyone could drive with confidence on Ottawa Valley roads. Traffic was light; the weather keeping many people at home, we assumed. At -6C, it wasn't too cold, just a driving wind and thick snow descending without letup. We had missed a week of shopping and the refrigerator and pantry were lower than I can ever recall even though we had picked up fresh fruits and vegetables mid-week.

It took forever to get the shopping done. The shopping cart was full to the brim.  We had four large plastic containers of groceries and four heavy bags full of groceries to bring into the house from the garage. Our frantic puppies calmed down when Irving gave them some fresh cauliflower to chew on, and then he helped me put all the groceries away.

He was busy after breakfast, winding some of his clock collection, and moving some things around from room to room. He decided to bring an old grandfather clock up from the downstairs recreation room to sit in a niche in the foyer. It's actually a grandfather case clock he made himself from scrap wood decades ago. He made the face of tin and he painted traditional motifs on the face. When he was finished he installed an antique clock movement that he had bought about fifty years ago and it still runs perfectly.

Snow continued unabated all afternoon, and stopped only at 4:00 p.m. So much had accumulated that we knew it would be beyond difficult to wade through the deep fluff, both for us and for the puppies. It was deep enough for them to disappear in while trying to paddle through it. We'll give it a go tomorrow, we told them, after the trail had been broken by others, far younger than us and with more energy to spare.