Waiting for Spring!

Squatch hates spring.  Not sure why, cause right now, I'm thrilled to be able to take the dog out without bundling up in full winter gear every half hour.  It's been a pretty brutal winter, and I'll admit, we really didn't get out to do much.  There were a few trips to a local park to walk the dog, and one trip to Algonquin to cross country ski (Chris and the kids skied, I walked the dog around the Logging Museum trail three times.)

I was starting to think the weather would never warm up.  March break started with a -22 morning, but two days later, it's +10 and beautiful out.  Gotta love march, eh? Of course, this morning I woke up to a blizzard, and tomorrows supposed to feel like -17 so maybe spring isn't as close as I'd thought.

Still, it's only a few weeks until we can hopefully head to Algonquin for a few nights for our birthdays...provided we can get the trailer out from the snowbank it's been partially buried in all winter. Also, it's about time I started preparing dried meals for our canoe camping adventures this summer...whatever they may end up being.  I'm really not liking not having anything planned,  So far for this year we have one trip booked and the rest of the summer is up in the air.

I know a lot of canoeists have already spent a month preparing their camp meals for this coming season, and I'm hoping to start next week once the kids are back to school.  This task has been made both easier and more difficult by the fact I recently decided to go vegan (or mostly vegan...I'm easing my way in since it's kind of expensive to get some of the vegan alternatives to a lot of products we use all the time.)  Why easier and harder?  Well, easier because pretty much any meal I might want to make should dry easily with no meat to worry about, and harder because the rest of the family is not so thrilled with the idea and are still determined to eat meat.  Not sure how that's going to work, vegan meal for me with smaller portions for them as sides to go with something else?  Meh, as long as there's no tofu, Chris will eat it, and to be honest the kids aren't really big meat eaters anyway...they just think they are.