At this point in our lives it's hard to remember much less imagine how we managed to do so many things while we were both in the workforce. We'd leave the house early in the morning, return in the late afternoon, and find time to go out to the forest for an hour's hike, prepare dinner, read and relax, and then do the same thing again the following day. Weekends were for shopping for groceries, cleaning the house, looking after the garden, and either taking a hike up in Gatineau Park, Quebec's priceless nature preserve, or do some canoeing in one of its lakes. We certainly crammed a lot into each day.

We still do, relatively speaking. Only now the entire day is ours to do with as we wish. And even so, retaining old familiar habits of getting out into nature, gardening, looking after our little dogs, cleaning the house, meal preparation, takes all of those hours now. The difference in how time is used is our attention to the Internet. We spend time on social media platforms, as well as blogging (me) and viewing old detective series (Irving) along with watching academic lectures and news debates.

We never did spend very much time watching events and entertainment on television. And now, for the past decade and more, though we have the service in a package that includes land line and Internet, we never bother with television, much less Netflix or anything similar. It's a medium of news and entertainment we determined quite a while ago that we could dispense with. We've never felt that way about the print news and look forward to our two daily newspaper arrivals.

Our habitual routines of importance to us, another matter altogether. Irving spent several hours in his workshop today. He's putting together another door as a frame for the latest stained glass window he conceived and created. It's a time-consuming, meticulous but rewarding art form and our house is full of stained glass, covering windows and encased in inner household doors. Because Monday is cleaning day, he also did the vacuuming to spare me the work, leaving the dusting, mopping and floor-washing to me.

Today turned out just as cold as yesterday and while there was wind it wasn't as brutally cutting as yesterday's. Moreover, the sky completely cleared early in the morning and remained that way for the balance of the day. When we took Jackie and Jillie out for their  usual afternoon walk through the woodland  trails, it was -7C and though not much sun filters down on the trails in the forest interior, the wind wasn't as much of a challenge as it had been yesterday. The trails have become a little more hard-packed and that too was a plus.

It's around this time in the winter that we begin to see small flocks of robins flying around the creek, settling briefly on protuberances such as rocks or fallen trees close to or over the creekbed and flying off together, then returning together in graceful waves of flight. Just as we wonder when we see squirrels or rabbits in such bitterly cold weather, it never ceases to amaze us that chickadees, nuthatches, cardinals, woodpeckers, crows and robins manage to endure our winters.

Jackie and Jillie certainly don't mind the cold, nor the icy fingers of wind that penetrate every nook and cranny, every fold of a garment. they rush about, far outdistancing us until they're called back, to remain closer to where we are; our locomotion is far more measured than theirs. Dressed protectively in their snug winter coats and tiny paws encased in rubber boots they can withstand the elements of familiar winter days.