Preface: Graphic header: Copyright Cartoon, by Dave Shaw

Hi Dave 

I was yakking with the neighbours when you called yesterday. Sorry I missed you. Unseasonably warm at present. Tomorrow’s high is 25 – I covered up the ac last week and shut it off at the circuit box. Too bad our summer wasn’t like this fall. 

Your inability to find interest in that great cartooning skill of yours is unfair, and a signal, in my mind, of the unwelcome future (for me anyways).

It’s a sad commentary when newspapers can no longer keep cartoonists. I read an article this week on a bit of an obituary on Robert Fulford, news writer extraordinaire with many of Canada’s foremost newspapers and magazines. Use Google search: Robert Fulford was a Master of his Noble Profession (Toronto Globe and Mail, October 19). I can’t send a link – its not released for public consumption yet. The article so impressed me that I downloaded Robert Fulford’s last book on kindle.

The paragraph that really got to me was one I sent to Hugh in response to feedback he received with regard to your samples, indicating that there were no opportunities for cartoonists in the news media any more. In preface I said to Hugh..

“Great comment in yesterday’s Globe re: Robert Fulford, by Marcus McGee. I’m afraid of what is happening to the print media, Hugh. McGee’s comment is deeply worrisome to me…”

Says McGee…

“ Man.
 These are tough times for his [Fulford’s] “noble profession,” as he called it in his death notice (self-written, of course). In a distracted, divided, distrustful world, many people are losing faith in the purveyors of the news. With so many papers shrinking or dying, it is easy to believe we are at the end of something.”

Something. I would never have seen the demise of newspapers earlier in my lifetime. In fact, I always wanted to live near the library (another dying institution). I wanted to be able to walk, wheelchair or whatever to the nearby library to read the newspaper. Oh my, how things change!

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As for things here, I continue to try to restore my failed knee and seem to be having some luck. It’s getting stronger, and elsewhere physically I have as well, thanks to the related exercises and my emphasis on keeping active. The knee really kept me housebound and inactive. For the first time since I was twelve, I have not played golf the entire season. Instead, in my rehab, I have focused on construction projects around the home, being careful, of course with my knee.

The contractor, who I had hired to save me from using my knee, was to build me a ground level deck. He was also to complete my temporary fence where I had a jut-in when they built my neighbour’s house. And he was to put in a gate in my chain link fence to ensure that I could access and remove weeds growing outside the fence in the small patch of our property beyond the chain link. He put gravel between the houses, but needed to put in more. He partially completed the fence adjoining my new neighbour and tore apart my chain link fence at the back, leaving a box of gate hardware on the ground nearby. Suddenly, the contractor didn’t show up anymore. Dah! After several weeks of unrealized texts, I realized he would never finish. I’m now selling his left-behind tools. 

Anyway, with the help of a close-by neighbour (at $40 per hour – cash of course) we finished the ground level deck and he thankfully put three yards of gravel over the geo-textile between the houses. I took on the installation of the chain link gate, deftly using my come-along (my original newfie fence builders told me to buy it, and I have since branded it as my come-from-away puller). Stretching the chain link was very hard work but I did it.

When finished, I went through the new gate and trimmed many of my neighbour’s  low hanging, eye gouging, cedar branches with my reticular saw. I bagged all of that wood and branches and put them into yard waste bags in preparation for our twice a year yard waste pickup. Btw, I’ve got 27 bags to put out. In addition to the cedar trimming, many of the additional waste bags have been filled with sod I removed from the low level deck area. That was more difficult than you’d think in Crysler clay!

So I told you about these feats of strength and exercise undertaken while still recuperating because when my doctor – I got to see him after a fluke opportunity was made available by a spur of the moment cancellation – gave me a cortisone shot for my knee he also instructed me to get a blood test. It sadly revealed that I was pre-diabetic. 

I am now on a healthy diet. Can you believe no chips, no cookies with my coffee, no raisin bread, no pancakes doused in maple syrup, no chocolates, no ice cream (very sad), no carrot cake with Hugh and none of the other good things my body has thrived on for 70+ years? I have learned to like whole wheat wrap(s) with smashed avocado on hummus with chopped tomatoes. I enjoy whole grain buns with chicken or turkey slices, sometimes with fattening, high sugar cheese (where, oh where, though did the pastrami and smoked meat go?). My wife makes great soup accompanied by triscuits – the whole wheat nothing added crackers. 

I track my eating on an app and count my bicycling exercise twice a day that reduces the immediate sugar smack which I am replacing with fruit-lessened sugar smacks – strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, cantaloupe, banana and fibre one high fibre cereal. How’s that for a breakfast?

I’m becoming the diabetes association poster boy for how to eat healthy. I’ve also lost 10 pounds which is good except none of my pants fit around the waist and I’ve had to continuously pull them up and move my belt buckle over a  notch. I even bought a pair of 36” (vs 38”) Costco blue jeans ($23.99) which remarkably fit my new skinny? physique.

My sugar had better come down, though, by the time I have a command appointment with my doctor in December, or I promise to take the track so many people have taken – gimme metformin and let me get back to eating as I always have.

Oh how life changes.

And did I tell you we can’t walk the dog on Crysler streets because our neighbour millionaire farmer decided to take his manure spreader down our humble streets and leave little treasures for the dog to eat (it gives him diarrhea!). Maybe that’s just another story for a different time. I can just see Mainstreet Rob’s visions of “After the Harvest”.

Cheers, but keep on tooneying. You are too good to give it up.