Stoic Week starts tomorrow, Monday, October 18. I’ve been doing this annual program for quite a few years and it has been so helpful to me, especially in finding some emotional balance. I have a pretty easily triggered fight-or-flight response to conflict, and practicing Stoic principals has helped me find ways to step back when I feel threatened and see things from a more detached place. I’m still working on this, and in no way can I claim to be calm in the face of everything, but more and more I’m able to stay in my body and think things through, and this is in large part due to reading and thinking about Stoicism.
There’s still time to enrol in this free course, and this year they are offering a new program for students or those who are caring for or instructing young people. They have added more video and audio supports, which is helpful to people like me who are not strong readers. I have an especially busy week ahead, and there is a bit of a time commitment to doing the readings and exercises each day, but it will be worth finding the time for a Stoic reboot.
Bumble bee season is winding down here. There are still a few flowers in bloom around our house, and a few bees moving between them, but most bees and other insects are bedding down and getting ready for a well-deserved rest.
I now have confirmed four bumble bee species through Bumble Bee Watch, all observed within a few feet of our house. Leaving patches of red clover, purple vetch and asters to grow in our lawn has brought many more insects to our yard. It looks a bit messy to most people, but only if you think a lawn should look like a bowling green; I think it looks like a bee buffet!
Kiva is hosting its first international Kiva Hackathon, “supporting microfinance, digital identity, poverty alleviation and financial inclusion.” Ready, set, hack!
This piece on the former Indian day school on Lennox Island First Nation has made me rethink so many things I thought I knew. I happily went to a brand new, modern elementary school only 15 minutes from Lennox Island at the same time the children there were being abused and mistreated. I’m ashamed that I had no idea this went on next door to me. This is the truth.
As in the last federal election, we arranged a mail-in ballot for my mother. Her ballot arrived quickly, so we three voted a couple of weeks ago, all by special ballot.
This is at least the second federal election where not one candidate has come to our door, and I think it has probably been longer than that. They just can’t cover as many houses in a day out here (and political affiliations are not a big secret in West Prince!).
It’s kind of like Halloween: even the kids from the country head to the villages and towns because you can visit more houses and get more candy in densely populated areas.
Trick or treat also sort of sums up my feelings on this election.
We still have two of our three feeders up for ruby-throated hummingbirds, but it’s been a week since I’ve seen one, so will take them down tomorrow.
The first hummingbird arrived on May 12 and the last departed on September 12. We seemed to have more hummingbirds than usual this summer, though they are nearly impossible to count! I counted about a dozen around one feeder.
I’ve only tracked how much white sugar I’ve used to make the syrup feed since 2018, but the first three years I used an average of 13.75 cups of sugar and this year used 27 cups! There were a couple of weeks in July that I was filling one of our one-cup-capacity feeders three times a day, something I’ve never had to do. Must have been ideal breeding conditions.
I think of them often, so tiny, making their way to Central America. Those born this summer flying on their own, drawn by who-knows-what to keep flying forward just because that is the thing they should do.
My mother was asked if her RCAF uniform could be used in a display in connection with the upcoming publication of a book by PEI historian Katherine Dewar about PEI women who served in the Second World War. Katherine and Lois Brown, who was with the Canadian Women’s Army Corps in the Second World War and is a lively 97-year-old, came up last week to take the bits and pieces my mother has.
My mother’s air force blue uniform is nearly complete, except for stockings and shoes, which she used after the war and wore completely out. Her khaki uniform has always been a bit of a mystery to me. She always called it her summer uniform, but I believe it was what she was wearing when she ended her service on January 9, 1945, as her last meal card and clearance certificate (incorrectly dated as 1944) are still in the inside jacket pocket. As she ended her military career in Halifax, in January, it would have been far from summer weather! I hope to get more information from PEI Regiment Museum curator Greg Gallant about that uniform.
I also gathered up various pins that were scattered around the house in different little boxes. She would have received or bought most of them during the war, the General Service Badge would have been worn after the war (probably by my father, but not sure), and another is one of many pins she’s been sent periodically by this or that group honouring different battles and anniversaries.
RCAF (WD) poster
I imagine Katherine’s book will touch on the fact that women who had served weren’t regarded as real veterans immediately after the war. Women had been recruited to supporting roles to free up men to assume combat roles, so their service wasn’t considered to be the same.
While both of my parents were in the RCAF during the Second World War, neither of them served in Europe, spending their time in Canada or Newfoundland, which was considered an overseas posting as a British colony. My father was always viewed as being the “real” veteran in our family, even though his role as an RCAF mechanic put him in no greater danger than my mother. They were both involved in the background of the Battle of the Atlantic during their time in Newfoundland, he at Gander and she at Torbay, and I’m sure both of those stations were on the German hit list for a possible invasion of North America, which thankfully never happened.
My father mistakenly wore my mother’s medals all his life, and it was only after his death, when I was asked to help with an award nomination for my mother, that I found out she had been given an extra medal (The Defence Medal) because of the length of time she had spent in Newfoundland, and my father’s time there hadn’t qualified.
I don’t believe for a second that my father even knew what he had done. I suppose when the medals arrived in the mail (ex-service members applied to get them after the war and they were mailed in a little box, no dramatic presentation by a senior officer as portrayed in movies), he just assumed the three were for him as he served for nearly 5 years and my mother for less than 2.
So my mother had worn my father’s two medals, never knowing the difference. When I brought this error to her attention, I didn’t think she would bother to start wearing her real ones, but she did, and still proudly wears them to Remembrance Day services and other official events. And now, because she is one of the few veterans left, people sometimes thank her for her service.
It didn’t say what they did at the Georgetown PO to keep the mail-seeking crowds away, but a polio outbreak meant strict public heath measures were in place across PEI 75 years ago. Vaccination has nearly eradicated polio worldwide, but there are still a few cases every year in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I had a great-uncle who had polio, which left him with with he called a “crooked foot” and unable to do many things. He would have an interesting perspective on COVID-19 anti-vaccination protests.
The first computer I remember using was a Commodore PET circa 1981. When I say using, I mean I watched as my male junior high classmates used it to play a very slow flight simulator in our Industrial Arts class; it was the late 70s, and girls couldn’t be trusted with high tech gadgetry. I did operate a plastic moulding machine in that class to make a small screwdriver I still use, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
When I was in high school, I took an introductory computer evening course at our local community college, and most of it was spent learning some of the BASIC programming language. I sort of forget, but I guess there weren’t any computer courses offered in my high school at the time, or at least not for my academic stream.
I found it difficult and never programmed anything after that course. It would be 5 or 6 years until I ever touched a computer again. At the time, computers didn’t seem like anything that would ever become important in my life, but rather something that someone smarter than me would study for a specialized career as a programmer.
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Don’t mess with me, I’m certified!Some of my industrial art (I did not make the pen, but I bet that was next on the course!)
Even before the Canadian federal election was called, the leader of the Conservative party sent each of us in our household a separate letter outlining his recovery plan to fix everything that is wrong with Canada (except, it seems, our relationships with Indigenous peoples, the climate and the electoral system, my top three issues this election). Three more letters arrived this week. Waste of resources, waste of beautiful trees.
Thought I’d at least mine this dreck for art, so here are three found poems. I did try to construct a jolly sounding poem, but it wasn’t possible from the doom and gloom bricks I was given.
