All it takes is one day of sunshine and reduced temperatures and you think, hey winter's over! Past experience doesn't dull the weather-optimist in us. So weren't we surprised when the morning met us with a rather pushy wind and another temperature drop to -11Degrees C. Winter, we keep telling ourselves sensibly, has a long way to go before it's finished with us for this season; we just don't believe it, though we should.

We left the house early, to get our grocery shopping done as expeditiously as possible. And another set of surprises awaited us there. We've been noticing -- who hasn't been? -- food prices steadily rising for quite some time. They don't seem to really stabilize, just keep teetering upward. This week that changed; they were bounding steeply higher and we just couldn't believe the price of some food stuffs.

Even my weekly choices of non-perishable food I put together for the community Food Bank was affected. Nowhere could I find cans of tuna below $2 each; last week we were paying $1.39 and I usually get four of them, four of the canned meats at $1.99 each, although I suspect by next week that'll be increased too.  I usually buy a pack of four boxes of macaroni and cheese, but only single boxes were available on the shelves. I was still able to get the store brand soup for $.99, but the shelves were bare of  anything but brand-name beans.

All dairy products have gone through the roof. Meat prices are teetering on the absurd. None of this particularly affects us other than for its surprise value, since we can afford steeper prices for our food. We've always felt that food prices were reasonable and an astute shopper could feed a family well if they concentrated on whole foods. But these high prices will certainly negatively affect a lot of people on fixed incomes in the lower middle-class and more so those living in poverty.

Yet it never ceases to amaze us that when we stop by another close-by supermarket, where the prices are always far greater than they are where we regularly shop, the parking lot is stuffed with cars whereas it's half-empty where we do our food shopping. We've never been able to figure that out. Same community, the stores not that far apart, and there's lots of them to choose from, but people tend to go to the high-priced supermarkets, bypassing those whose profit margin is lower.

Dinner last night fit the bill for comfort food. It's becoming routine for one day a week to roast a Cornish game hen, and produce a noodle-egg-raisin pudding alongside it, with an accompaniment of green vegetables. It's easy to prepare, just pop it all in the oven and forget about it until the house is steeped in the fragrance of dinner ready to be served.

After breakfast I decided to bake sugar cookies. They're for Irving, they don't appeal to me. They're absolutely plain rounds of crisp cookies with few ingredients and he loves them. The cookie dough is soft and easily handled; the kind of dough that is kneaded to a smooth consistency, then rolled out, cut into shapes and baked. An altogether simple operation.

We haven't seen very many people out in the forest these last few days, so our hikes have been quiet and peaceful. Today made up for all of that. And Irving had ample opportunity to greet the many dogs who know we're out somewhere in the ravine when they hear Jillie barking her irritating invitation to come and visit. And they waste no time searching us out. Because, we're convinced, if other dogs come around, there'll be a cookie party and if they get treats, so will she and Jackie, even though they've already had their treats.

The creek is in a confused state.  While it froze completely in last week's Arctic cold, the following days of milder weather led it to begin shedding the ice, then it refroze, and acquired a layer of snow over the ice at which time we thought it would retain its frozen state. Yet today, with -10C and wind, there were some openings in the ice; granted, where there's a series of little rapids.