The Environment Canada forecast is informing us of the continuation of this late summer/early fall heat wave. Today will be a scorcher, with 32 degrees expected to heat up the atmosphere. But we're also expecting afternoon showers and evening rain, so that should help moderate the temperature.

Because it is destined to be so hot we decided we'd take an earlier-than-usual meander in the ravine. By the time we left the house the clouds that had tamped the temperature to a reasonable level had dissipated and the sun was crowning the dome of a perfectly blue sky. There's some humidity, and little wind, but as soon as we dipped down the trailhead into the ravine there was immediate relief from the burgeoning heat.

Coolness prevailed, soothing our heated skin and you could almost believe the forecasters were wrong. This may represent the final hurrah for summer of 2016 as far as the heated atmosphere goes, on a prolonged basis.

Squirrels have been busy at the oak trees, biting off small branches to fall to the ground to better enable them, we can imagine, to gather acorns. Jackie and Jillie were more than a little intrigued by the odours they picked up sniffing about at the foliage on the forest floor. They're at the point where they exhibit curiosity at the presence of squirrels, with Jackie enjoying a short mad spurt after the squirrels who seem to enjoy the exercise as much as he does, leaping up tree trunks, and whisking their tails in jaunty mock-up of his spontaneous efforts to tree them.

New fungal specimens pop up out of the rich humus of the forest floor. And there are still ample wildflower specimens to brighten the landscape and render the pleasure of nature's artistic design all the more acutely.

Several Saturdays back when we took a pleasant early afternoon trip out to Merrickville on a very warm waning-summer day, we poked about at their annual antiques and collectibles show. We're always curious about what can be seen of an intriguing nature that appeals to us as collectors of this and that.

At one booth my husband saw a painting that the vendor advertised as a 19th Century reverse painting on glass in an oval frame that my husband thinks must date to about 1870 or thereabouts. It's a quaint outdoor landscape with variously incorporated architectural points, natural landscape, cultivated gardens and people out for what appears to be a Sunday stroll in pleasant surroundings.

There is the painting hanging on the right, and my husband scrutinizing objects in the booth's interior (black shirt)

Although we saw quite a few objects that were of interest, we did not embark on that trip with the intention of coming away with anything. But my husband relented, because the painting seemed appealing to him, and he bought it from the genial giant of a man selling it, for a reasonable asking price.

Lower left, seated girl, large dog beside her and a girl playing with a hoop, as adults in period garb stroll about.

It took my husband a series of days devoting an hour here or there to the painting and its frame, to clean it up, inspect it, and fully realize that there was a canvas at the back of the frame and this was likely an elderly patrician oil painting on canvas, not a reverse painting on glass. My husband cut out and fitted a thin oval, fitted to cover the back of the frame, and also filled a gap between the frame and the canvas which was firmly adhered to the very thin glass pressed into the frame. Finally, when the painting and its frame were presentable, it was hung.

It's a most interesting painting, very layered, my husband says, with his close painterly eye, but not all that distinct. There is no knowing where it hung for the years that it matured, how it was appreciated, the conditions it suffered if it was neglected. As an acquisition it isn't spectacular, simply interesting and pleasant to look at. And this is how we view it.

Lovely long week-end here, the weather co-operating nicely, with clear blue skies, bit of a wind and sun, plenty of it. Enough, at 28 degrees to make it seem truly, really hot, even with a low humidity level today.

One of the people we often come across in the ravine told us yesterday that it costs him $45 a month to have his dog groomed. In the sense that he has the middling-sized terrier groomed every two months at a cost of $90. In our household, our two little dogs get groomed even more frequently since their haircoat seems to grow so fast. And today was one of those grooming days when I sat out on the deck with them right after breakfast, an assortment of scissors in hand, and snipped their hair.

A pair of tidy-looking little dogs...!

They look more presentable; their little faces and paws in particular get extremely messy, so getting their hair cut defines their profile and helps to keep them clean as well. The cost is negligible; my ebbing patience with Jackie who makes it difficult, unlike Jillie, who lends herself quietly to the enterprise.

By the time we went off to the ravine the morning had recently fled, but in there it was cool and breezy, and we had a great ravine walk. After which we decided to go along to a local garden centre, just outside of town. We'd gone to one in the opposite direction yesterday afternoon but it wasn't a pleasant outing. I had wanted a few perennials, my tickseed and turtleheads in the front gardens had been squeezed out by the aggressive large sunflowers that had taken over their space.

I found the garden centre in quite a bit of disarray and the plants looking fairly miserable, but I did select one mature tickseed plant and a gaillardia; I found the turtleheads priced much too steeply. So today we went along to the other garden centre, it was well kept as usual, the plants in perfect order, well cared for, but it was hot and we were directly exposed to the sun, and after looking around we didn't see anything that we felt would enhance the garden, and left.

Afterward, I did do some gardening. When you're doing things like cleaning up, tidying about, planting a few things, you barely feel the discomfort of a hot day, and I didn't. So I separated a few plants; heuchera and hydrangea, and transplanted them elsewhere in the garden, and planted the new perennials and it just happened to be shady in the places where I put them, which was a bit of luck; for them and for me.

As good a way as any to spend a holiday day -- oops! Labour Day; perhaps I shouldn't have been labouring though it was indeed a pleasure.

Existence is full of mysteries. Things that are, things that occur, things that puzzle us for which there appears to be no reasonable explanation. From the macro-mysteries of the origins of the universe to the minds and souls of human beings, great minds attempt to puzzle out answers to vexing questions but the responses and the understanding still elude us. Perhaps these eternal questions will never be solved, because they have no answer; they just are.

The vast presence of the universe and our minuscule presence within our own immense galaxy, merely one of countless others in a space whose volume cannot begin to be known aside, there is the conundrum of human thought and passion.

What makes us the way we are? Clearly genetic endowment is hugely responsible, but also our early experiences of social and familial exposure, and for everyone, we are reminded, the experience and the inheritance is different. We are all imbued by the natural science that developed us out of nothingness encouraging gases, bio-chemicals and minerals to coalesce into a serendipitous mixture that would introduce biological life and eventually sensate creatures to our particular biosphere, but as numerous as we are, we are though intrinsically broadly alike, individually particularly ourselves.

We make our way through the years of our lives in our own inimitable ways. And we wonder at the anomalies between and among us, those who are social beings who would never dream, let alone be capable of doing harm to others among whom are those who spend their lives attempting to ameliorate the harm that others impose upon the luckless.

How to explain the existence of hate? Hatred independent of mental illness in particular. That despairingly venomous blame directed toward others culminating in a ferocious hatred so intense that doing the greatest of harm to those upon whom it is directed results in one human organism destroying another? On a large scale we have occurrences throughout history where tribal antagonisms result in massive, deadly assaults upon another group with the intention of exterminating them.

Genocide in the 20th Century took on its full dimensions during the years of the Second World War, and the destructive impact of the Holocaust.

Focusing on a more discrete level of human dysfunction is the event that took place last week in Toronto where a young man not known to have any degree of mental illness, a 27-year-old facing a bright future, on the cusp of marriage -- admittedly a young man with a propensity to criminality, thought to have been 'cured' of criminal theft, embarking upon a new life -- garroted his mother, and killed two of his brothers through the use of a bolt shot from a cross-bow.

Dysfunctional familiar relations resulting in one member of an otherwise entirely 'normal' family of their own free will succumbing to rejecting all the values that the others act upon, to embark on his own journey into the bleakness of rejection and antipathy toward  his own.

If my own experience is anything to go by, I recognize that these things happen, that human beings are particularly susceptible to emotional dissonances lacking the internal resources to recognize and pull themselves away from such malfunctions. These mental/emotional disturbances build over time and if and when the individual carrying these burdens is also fully immersed in a sense of misanthropy the combination can be deadly, creating a full spectrum of rejection of all it means to be human, capable of compassion for others and a willingness to live in peace among others in society.

No lack of oops! moments of late. From discovering that someone opened a full carton of fresh milk when the already-opened one wasn't depleted of its contents, to the discovery that good gracious, what're two containers of sour cream doing in the refrigerator!

And then, the overwhelming spurt of enthusiasm from the self-generated tomato vine sitting adjacent the garden's two composters which are filled three times weekly with kitchen waste as well as garden waste. Realizing that we've got to start harvesting the plethora of baby tomatoes they're flaunting.

Yesterday morning I baked a cheesecake, for Friday-night dessert, and realized just when I was preparing to place it into the counter-top convection oven I use during the summer months that it was on 'broiler' setting which I rarely use. I set it to bake, and in doing so fully understood why it was that the vanilla cupcakes I'd baked in it the week before, for Madeleines hadn't come out well, to say the very least. Because I always keep the setting on convection bake it hadn't occurred to me to check before putting the cupcakes in to bake.

We'd had guest staying over with us the previous week, and the only explanation I can think of is that someone used the oven, changing its setting. At least I noticed it before committing the cheesecake to its baking interior. And the cheesecake then baked to perfection, which the cupcakes of the week before did not, puzzling me enormously.

Oh, and the shopping this week ended up in our having not noticed that the cheese selected was fat-reduced. Neither my husband nor I appreciate any dairy product that has been fat-reduced, but this time a few products slipped beyond our notice into our shopping basket. No harm done, other than to our taste buds.

But shopping does present its complications; checking for 'best before' dates, for the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, and spurning those that are over-the-hill; checking for ingredient lists to avoid buying products that have too much salt, too much saturated fat. It isn't that difficult to overlook the occasional food item whose purchase for us represents a diligence slip-up.

The subtle but unmistakable signs of approaching fall remind us that the leisure summer days we've been enjoying are now limited. Night-time temperatures are dropping. We bid reluctant farewell to daylight hours so much sooner; it has all crept up on us, unnoticed until it can no longer not be noticed.

And with it a certain kind of mild sadness enters my mind. I can trace it back to when our children were young, attending elementary school, and I so much enjoyed having them at home during the summer months, and so much ached, missing them, when they returned to school. This lingers, though our grandchild is now 20.

Being in the out-of-doors has always been important to us. When we were raising our three children, from the time they were infants we were accustomed to taking them to conservation areas to make the most that we could of being in natural surroundings. We like to think that they all remain hugely appreciative of our debt to nature in the quality of our lives.

Until they were in their late teens our family did so much exploration of our natural surroundings, it all became second nature to them, just as it had to us. Our youngest perhaps carries that love and that need to extremes, spending as much time as he does outside of his working hours -- which, as a biologist also takes him into the great outdoors -- in recreational exploration of the great, wide world around us.

As for us, we now have our daily rambles in the woods in nudging distance of our home, taking our little companion dogs out with us for what is an indispensable part of our lifestyle. Yesterday was no different. We found the forest floor still damp from yesterday afternoon's unexpected downpour. When we had ventured out much earlier in the day there was no hint of rain, nor was there any in the forecast.

We now see nothing left of thimbleberry and blackberry fruit; their season has passed. But the jewelweed down by the creek is blooming happily. The haws of the Hawthorn trees are bright orange and red, little specks of brightness in the predominant sea of green. The purple asters that we so much more appreciate than the ordinary white ones are now in full display.

And a combination of impending fall with its shorter days and the accumulation of rainfalls has encouraged the pop-up growth of fungi out of the forest floor in shades of yellow, creamy white and orange. And that strangely mysterious blue-grey fungus that reminds me of death.

Jackie and Jilly are happy to be out and about always on the lookout for friends and acquaintances, joyful when they see another dog they're familiar with, and curious about people they have never before seen. It's a good life.

The geology of the Ottawa Valley is a groundwork based on Leda clay and sand, a truly unfortunate combination. Leda clay is hugely unstable; pairing it with sand only makes it more unstable. When Leda clay is inundated with moisture it becomes almost liquid, moving about perilously for anything built upon it. That combination is particularly fraught when earthquakes occur. And this region is also notorious for being earthquake-prone.

We don't get the kind of earthquakes that other such zones are known for, but there are the occasional tremblors that are truly frightening when the earth moves dramatically, stunning people unaccustomed to such phenomena. When we lived in Tokyo it was a common occurrence to feel the earth shake under us. We always felt more or less calm when it occurred, whether we were indoors or outdoors.

Here in Ottawa it's uncommon, but about nine years ago we experienced the most frightening such event we had ever been exposed to when we heard the overwhelming roar of a steam engine outside our house leaving us to wonder briefly what kind of mechanical behemoth was passing on the street outside our front door, while the floors beneath us shuddered then swayed for what seemed an interminable length of time. We fled downstairs and out the door.

Since the time we moved into our house twenty-five years ago, the second home we've owned in Ottawa, we have been aware of our paved driveway slowly and gradually sinking. When that happens the lip of the concrete floor of the garage has a height-distance created between driveway level and garage floor level. On a number of occasions we've had that distance capped by a fresh infusion of paving material. Each time this happens, everything is fine for years, and then that distance once again crops up.

A dozen years ago we came across a man who had retired from working as a paint mechanic and who took up driveway repair instead. He was the most affable, conscientious person imaginable, and for several years he would return to freshen up the driveway and fill any gaps that would occur. Then we heard he had died of cancer of the lungs caused by his previous work inhaling chemicals. What we weren't aware of was that when he became ill he sold his business to another man.

Now, that other man  is working on our driveway, using the same equipment he bought from the previous man, along with his truck and calling cards. And this man too, with whom we've become recently acquainted, shares the personality of the first man, including personability and attention to meticulous detail.