Our expectation was that we would wake to snow squalls this morning, given the weather warning forecasting just that, yesterday afternoon. We had also received an email from the company that does the snow-plowing on the street. However, we saw nothing of the kind this morning. We did see a thermometer that made us shiver, though it's certainly not unexpected, at -6.5C. No worries, it steadily rose until  it hit -1C for the afternoon high. That was after we'd gone to the ravine for our hike through the woods with Jackie and Jillie when it was an icy -2.3C.

 

When we left the house it was -2.3 under a heavily overcast sky and a miserable, penetrating wind. But we were dressed for it. We could actually smell the snow, hovering above, teasing us, but not a flake descended while we were out. There was heavy frost everywhere, on the roofs of houses and our little garden sheds. Even blades of grass on the lawn held frost.

 

While we were grateful for the excellent footing on the trails which were now fully frost-penetrated, it was cold. We've just got to become better acclimatized all over again to what our winters are like. We haven't had any precipitation to speak of for at least a week and it's been fairly dry, even though an overall feeling of cold dampness had settled in. We could see ice crystals had formed, in some places thick enough to resemble a true ice formation where existing moisture had succumbed to the low temperature.

 

There are no more bugs, beetles, bees, mosquitoes or butterflies flitting about. They've found their shelters for the winter. Oddly, we were surprised to find an almost-comatose, but still fumbling-about wasp in the house on the framework of the front door, yesterday. Irving gently placed it outside where it will, of course, perish. The desperate inundation of ladybugs of years past did not materialize this year, attempting to prolong life in a futile effort to find shelter from the cold -- inside homes.

 

We enjoyed an invigorating hike through the trails, then left Jackie and Jillie at home while we escaped to get our food shopping done for the week. The self-serve cashouts now outnumber the cashier-served cashouts and usually only one manned by a cashier is open. When we were ready to leave, a man we had noticed in the aisles several times while we were shopping was there ahead of us getting an enormous pile of food selections stuffed into his shopping cart serviced by one of the cashiers we've long been familiar with.

His was an extraordinary performance. For every item he plucked out of his cart -- plus an auxiliary cart he had parked outside the aisle, next to his main cart -- he consulted what was presumably a list of items on his iphone. This performance was time-consuming and confusing to us, we had never before in our shopping experience seen anything like it. It was clear from the accumulating pile that he would also be forever packing everything.

Finally, another cashier opened up and we slide over to her and we were checked through, packed and ready to go. As we glanced back at this peculiar shopper meticulously checking through his shopping list -- I forgot to mention that puzzlingly, the items seemed to represent discrete lists. While we had been behind him, waiting for the excruciating show to come to an end, he paid a total electronically, then commenced with an additional list and associated items and another total he paid. This happened three times.

As we looked back before exiting the store, he was still selecting items out of the two shopping carts and the pile awaiting packing had grown enormously. We were glad to be delivered from the scene into the sharp cold of the outside so we could head back home, still shaking our heads in wonder at the inappropriate and truly peculiar behaviour of people thinking nothing of inconveniencing others through a rigorous shopping experience unlike any other.