Dog Cookie

Wombat had some bad breath when she came back from the kennel so I decided to make her some cookies that hopefully would help with the breath (and other smelly issues). Wombat is not a picky eater (she very excitedly ate blocks of ice that Zac was throwing in the yard one day after I scraped out the chucks in the freezer) but according to her these cookies are amazing (lay-down-on-the-cold-kitchen-tiles amazing). All I did was take a very large handful of parsley, a small handful of mint, chopped them up, added wholemeal flour and enough water to make a thick cookie dough. I then added a bit of baking soda and mixed everything up really well. I made 5 large-ish cookies (I didn't want to make too big a batch because there wasn't anything to preserve the cookies in the ingredients). I baked them until they looked a bit golden and were cooked through (not sure how long that was-- maybe 15 minutes). Such an easy and healthy treat to make for Wombat, we'll have to make them for her more often (it would be so easy to make a small batch to throw in the oven when we're cooking something else or make larger batches and freeze them).

Canada

We did a 2 week trip to Canada over the school holidays to meet my new niece.

(all cute and bundled up at Fisherman's Wharf)
For Zac's birthday I managed to get up tickets to a Canucks game the day after we arrived in Vancouver. The picture makes us look really far away but they were actually pretty good seats and we could see everything. The Canucks won so that made it even better.

The night after the Canucks game we had tickets to see the lead singer from one of our favourite bands (The Weakerthans) do a solo show. As well as doing stuff from his newly released solo album, he played a lot of Weakerthans and Propagandhi songs.

When we got to the island my brother decided that we should do an overnight trip up the island to go see some family and go to Tofino (somehow I'd never been to Tofino before).

On the way up we stopped at Cathedral Grove to see some of the oldest trees on the island (up to about 800 years old!)

We got to see snow as we went over the pass to Port Alberni (and there was even snow in town when we arrived in Port Alberni but it was mostly gone when we left a few hours later).
We stayed at Crystal Cove Beach Resort in Tofino for a night. We had a private cabin with ocean view (we could have got one with a private hot tub but the ocean view hot tub cabins weren't available when we made our booking and we decided ocean view was more important). We did have a fire place and sat infront of the fire all evening after a walk on the beach. The bed was the most amazing bed I have ever slept on (all 4 of us agreed the beds were the best ever and even Maya slept longer than usual so I'm sure she'd agree it's the best bed if she could talk).

The next day we went to Long Beach and did a beach walk and hiked the Amphitrite Lighthouse trail.
The rest of the trip was mostly spent in Victoria enjoying the amazing spring weather, helping my brother with stuff at my mom's house and spending time with family. The Canucks made it into the playoffs while we were there, with game 1 happening the night before we were flying back out. We managed to get 2 tickets off a friend again and went to game 1 of the playoffs. Unfortunately the Canucks didn't do so well that night so it was kind of a sad way to end our trip but we did get free Canucks playoff towels from the game (hopefully we'll get to go wave those around at the pub if the Canucks go further in the playoffs and we actually make it down to the Imperial Hotel when they're showing the games).

On our way home we had a 10 hour layover at LAX so we decided we had to leave the airport so we didn't go insane. We managed to have a nice afternoon out, eating lunch at a veggie burger place and going to Manhattan Beach. I'll do a separate post about that part of the trip though.