Perhaps the most shocking thing in this blog to date occurred about June 4th or 5th. I had been drinking a lot – several glasses of red wine every day. Not getting drunk or anything, but habitually drinking and looking forward to 5:00 pm. So I decided to take the month of June off booze. I’ve done June a few times before and this year was even easier as June 1st fell on a Sunday. By about the 4th or 5th of June, I just decided I had had enough booze in my life and chose to give it up entirely.
Well almost entirely.
Save for a couple of glasses of wine at Karen Ross’s 70th party and one night with Pat and Steve Woodhouse, I didn’t drink anything for the rest of the summer. It was shockingly easy. I guess 50 years of drinking was enough. Now I’m shooting to live to 100.
In June we also went to Toronto for Jocelyn Brodie’s Celebration of Life. It was at Edward’s Gardens and lovely on an extraordinarily hot day. The next day we drove to Orillia to pick up a second-hand canoe, then on to Midland to be late for the OLA bbq.
We did visit Pat and Steve in early July at their place in Collingwood. Steve owed me a no-holds-barred dinner for 4 so I wasn’t going to let him off the hook with me having no booze. Still, his bill was about CA$400, mine was US$800. That’s OK tho, we love Pat and Steve.
That night Steve broke the news to Christy (I had gone to bed) that Pat had a type of blood cancer and was seeking treatment. He was devastated and so are we. They came to visit us briefly in Huntsville on their way home from visiting his father in Jocko Point. We tried to convince Pat to seek alternative treatment/second opinions rather than go the traditional medical route of chemo and surgery. We got a Collingwood naturopath recommendation from CORE Health but the next thing we heard was Pat was starting chemo at Princess Margaret.
We told them the story about our friend Jason (his fridge below) who had some intestinal pain, went to emergency. They took some samples and told him he had colon cancer and he needed surgery/treatment right away. Jason says “I can’t go for surgery, my house is for sale, we’re moving to PEI.” Doc says, “You can’t go to PEI, you have to take your house off the market and stay in Huntsville for treatment.” Jason goes to see a natural guy, who clears the blockage and all is well. Goes back to the Huntsville doc who says “Oh, maybe you just needed a little Metamucil or something like that. But there’s some issues with your liver, we’ll have to operate.” Seeya later says Jason. (Sad note as I update this on 20 November 2025, Jason died yesterday of turbo cancer.)
Girls had their weekend at the cottage where I am allowed to hang about, drive the boat and stay out of the way.
This summer our nephew Sean’s marriage broke up which was a shock to all of us. The only good thing to come out of it was a weekend getaway we hosted for Sean, Andrew and Brian King at the cottage. They seemed to enjoy it and we had this along with the new boat for them.
This summer I golfed a fair bit and played quite a few times with Ben. We would typically meet at Cedarhurst near Beaverton and play 36. Loved those days. He’s getting much better. We also got fitted for drivers – I got the Callaway Elyte – he got a Taylormade. He crushes his, I miss my shots less.
On August 8th Christy and vacated the cottage so Ben and his friends could have it for the weekend. Christy and I went on an Algonquin Park canoe trip – drive in at South River, launch at Kawawaymog Lake, down the Amables du Fond river to North Tea Lake. We canoed through North Tea to Manitou Lake where we spent our first night. Turns out to be the same route I took in high school about 50 years ago. 50 years, hard to believe.
Photos above from camp one, Friday night. Beautiful nights, full moon, friendly mozzies.
Our first site was OK, not great for swimming (in fact we didn’t) but fine.
Next morning we took an alternate route back to North Tea and found a great site with a west-facing beach only about an hour’s paddle from our first portage out on Sunday morning. Pretty disappointing to find copious defecation piles and several stashes of ladies tampons. Used. What kind of people do that? We clean up as much as we can stomach.
We’re up early Sunday morning as we want to try and get back in time to see Ben and his friends. We’re the second or third group to the first portage and we can see behind us more approaching so we’re glad to be getting through here before it gets busy. One girl tells us it will be packed later. For us, it’s no problem.
Still, we stop in South River for a burger and fries (fries great, burger crap) and learn Ben and gang have already left for a golf game further south.
Been a long time since we’ve done any canoe camping, hope to do it again next year.
Thanksgiving at Aunt Jane’s new place this year. They wanted to order Chinese, but no way says Christy and Perry, we bring a turkey. Ben and I played golf in Guelph while the girls go to a play in Stratford. Would have liked to play at least 27 holes with Ben, but had to get back to put the bird in the oven.
