Author Archives: Thelma

MyPEI Account

I had a health test recently, the results of which I would receive in the mail. Not having heard anything by this morning, I wondered for the thousandth time in my life why the results couldn’t be available to me online. I decided to search “PEI patient medical records” to see if there has been any update on this long-promised service.

I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon a pilot project for MyPEI and MyHealthPEI, where PEI residents can signup for early access to both online government and health services. I gathered the ID I needed to register, quickly moved through the easy online verification process, which included me saying my name in a video that is uploaded to their system to be reviewed by someone somewhere (verification in person is also available at Access PEI locations), and within a couple of hours, my account was active.

I haven’t had much time to look around on the MyPEI site (don’t think there’s actually much there yet), but the MyHealthPEI site (which seems to be provided by Telus Health) contained a list of my immunizations back to 2013. The Lab Results section was empty, but I found a notice that said they will be making results available for tests starting with those taken in March 2025.

The My Health Links section seems to be rich with links to resources on a wide range of topics. I’ve always found the Health PEI website a bit awkward to navigate – you sometimes need to know what you are looking for to look for it! – but this is well laid out.

In the end, I didn’t find what I wanted this time, but am hopeful that soon the days of waiting for medical tests to show up in the mail will be a thing of the past. The adoption of electronic medical records has been a long and bumpy process for the PEI health system, so this is a positive and important step.

Gulf Of Mexi-no

Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah

I have a blue winter jacket I bought at Eddie Bauer in Toronto about 30 years ago. I wore it every winter day for years. The colour has faded and it’s a bit too big for me now, but the jacket is generally in great shape, no rips or tears. It’s been my chore and barn coat for a long time.

The zipper stopped zipping a couple of years ago, splitting when I pulled the slider up, the plastic teeth meeting but not grabbing. The jacket also has snaps, so I just used those instead, but it wasn’t ideal.

This morning I wondered if there was a way to fix the zipper. Of course there is! The slider just needed to be tightened a bit, as per this video. Five seconds with a pair of pliers and my coat zipped up as in days of yore and I was off to shovel snow. Magic.

Of The Empire

I’m late to my (mostly) daily readings today. As well as my own book of collected quotes and poems (which I now know is called a commonplace book), my small stack of books at present are:

More Daily Wisdom: 365 Buddhist Inspirations, edited by Josh Bartok
How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, Translated with a commentary by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood
The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver

I have a couple of Mary Oliver books I rotate in and out of my stack. I simply go through the book from one poem to the next, so today’s selection surprised me, reflecting how I’m feeling as I try to ignore the news from the country to the south, a place I don’t understand, and whose leaders I now somewhat fear.

OF THE EMPIRE

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Mary Oliver
from the book Red Bird, 2008, Beacon Press

Up West

*From The Western Guardian section of the Charlottetown Guardian, January 16, 1925*

This brief item in the January 16, 1925 Charlottetown Guardian made me smile. I would expect many Summersiders today would suspect they don’t often get a better deal than Charlottetown folks, but at least on the train in 1925 there was a benefit in coming from the western capital!

The region of PEI where I live is commonly referred to as Up West. It’s more Up Northwest, really, from the rest of the island, but as the main highway through our end of PEI, Route 2, has long been referred to as the Western Road because it starts from the western end of Summerside, we are west.

Some people in central PEI can take the “up” part too literally, as if you have to climb a steep mountain to get here. There is a notion – mostly apocryphal, but a little bit true, in my experience – that when you try to organize a meeting between people in my area and folks from Charlottetown, or even sometimes Summerside, you will hear “But it’s soooo far to go to Tyne Valley/O’Leary/Alberton/Tignish!”, as if the distance would be magically shorter for us to go to them.

Maybe someone at the PEI Railway knew of this magic directional difference, perhaps similar to a magnetic hill, and that prompted the cheaper west-to-east fare to the 1925 hockey game. Mistake? Mischief? Delightful whatever the reason.

Spruce Cone

After an absence of over 40 years, I have been attending church regularly for nearly a year. The same church I had been raised in, with some of the same people who were there when I last attended regularly in my mid-teens.

My mother stopped driving in 2016, so her cousin and his wife kindly took her to and from church. When my mother’s mobility declined after three hospitalizations in the winter of 2023/24, I felt it unfair for these thoughtful older relatives to have the responsibility of looking after my mother, so I told her I would take her.

This past Sunday, the minister’s sermon was focused on the baptism of Jesus, which is part of Epiphany, the season that follows Advent. One of the scripture readings was from the third chapter of the Gospel of Luke:

When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

Luke 3: 21-22

The minister, a thoughtful and interesting speaker, asked the congregation if we had ever seen a dove descend from heaven, if we had ever heard God speak. There was silence, indicating that no one had, or nobody was prepared to talk about it if they had, and he went on to talk about what that might have been like to hear God (and he talked about Eric Clapton, too, which isn’t usual in the Presbyterian Church of Canada, but most welcome, at least by me).

I’ve never heard the booming bossy voice of the Christian God as described throughout the Bible. I’m pretty sure he’s not that well pleased with me, despite me taking my mother to church every week, so I’m just as happy to not hear what he has to say.

What I do hear is the voice of the eternal spirit, the beating heart of the cosmos, the kind and merciful universe. Where? In the rustle of the leaves in trees, easily one of my most favourite sounds in the entire world.

Today I was walking through a field near our house, a field surrounded by tall trees that have watched me move around this land for nearly 60 years. The sun had just come out briefly, a rare occurrence so far this year, and I heard a flock of finches in the forest, always calling to one another as they move through the trees.

Suddenly, I looked up and saw a solitary finch flying high over the field, and it had something big in its mouth. Just as I thought I’ve never seen a finch carrying something so big, it dropped its load, and as it fell I could see it was a spruce cone. The cone bounced on the snow and the bird continued on its way as if that had been the plan all along.

I hurried over to see it and it was indeed a spruce cone, complete with a couple of spruce needles stuck its base. I could smell the distinct odour of spruce sap, and realised the bird must have plucked this directly from a tree, a gift from high up in a tree, a place I could never visit.

I put the cone in my pocket and brought it home and put it in a little dish. The seeds are already dropping out of it. It still smells of sap.

With you I am well pleased.

Imagine it already broken

I once read about an exercise where you imagine an object you desire or cherish being broken so your attachment to it isn’t so strong that you are disappointed if it breaks; of course it is broken, it was always broken, you will sagely say when your new car gets a ding in a parking lot. Sounds Buddhist, but I’ve read so much wooology it could be from just about any practice but, yes, probably Buddhist.

I have just started my third 10-year journal. I was sorry to say goodbye to the second one from Because Time Flies as it had become a powerful tool for recording things that matter to me, but the fellow who published it seems to have disappeared.

So I bought a fancy Midori one instead, smaller and beautifully designed, and I know I will make it work for me. I don’t have lovely penmanship, so this isn’t an Instagrammable pursuit. It’s a lovely book, but I’ll be using it in a utilitarian fashion, and that’s ok.

When I sat down this morning to record the events of yesterday, I automatically started writing on the page opposite yesterday’s entry, as I had for the past 10 years with the other larger book that had room for 10 years of each date per page. But this is a smaller book, and the two-page spread is for one date, so I had entered the minutiae of January 2, 2025 in January 1, 2030’s spot.

I hadn’t imagined this lovely Japanese book as already broken, but now it was, and I was happy to have that behind me, and continued on.

Gus Gain

Freeland made the front page of the Charlottetown Guardian on this date in 1949 with the sad news that the body of Augustine “Gus” Gain had been found in the woods.

Elderly Man Perishes In Woods At Freeland

The body of Augustine Gain, 81, was found about ten o’clock on the morning of December 24th in the woods about a mile from his home. He had been missing since the previous day and an all-night search had been carried on.

An investigation was conducted by members of Summerside Detachment R.C.M.P., and the Coroner, Dr. Austine Delaney and it was decided that death was due to natural causes and exposure and that an inquest would not be necessary. The body was frozen when found.

A considerable sum of money was found in various pockets of the clothing. The elderly man had lived alone for a number of years and was last seen alive about noon the day previous when he left the store of A. Philips after procuring supplies and started for his home a mile and a half away.

The day was warm and the walking was heavy. That evening it was noticed by his nephew, James Gain, who lives nearby that there was no light in his uncle’s house and on investigation he found that he was missing. – S

I asked my mother if she remembered someone called Augustine Gain and she said, “Oh yes, Gus Gain. He used to come to our store.” Clinton Morrison’s history of Lot 11, Along the North Shore, says Gus lived in the community of Murray Road, so I asked my mother where Gain’s house was and she replied, “There by the water, you know, by Gain’s Creek.” Of course. There are no more Murrays or Gains in our area, but their names live on.

So there is a typo in the article, as the store mentioned in the article did not belong to A. Philips, but to my father H. Phillips, or rather, H.E. Phillips. Harold Edmund. He used both initials in business, and I have no idea why, except that it probably made him sound more prominent when in fact, in 1949, they were barely scraping by.

It was probably my mother who served Gus that Thursday two days before Christmas, and she could have been the last person to see him alive. The drive from our old store to where Gus lived is only about five minutes by car, but that’s a round about route if you are on foot, so he would have walked a well-worn path through the forest as a short cut. We sometimes used that same path for snowmobiling when I was a child in the 1970s, and I can still pick it out when I look at recent aerial photos. It’s swampy in places back there, would be terrible walking if the ground wasn’t completely frozen.

This blog now memorializes two PEI men named Gus who died in 1949.

First 3D Printing

One of the locks on a 22-year-old Jeld-Wen casement window in our bedroom stopped working properly this summer. The window has a lock on either side that pulls the window sash tight against the frame when closed. The lock handle had always clicked into an open position ready to accept the tab on the sash to pull the window tight, but suddenly the handle wouldn’t stay in the open position. It was more an inconvenience than a huge problem, but seemed it should be fixable.

I unscrewed the handle to remove it from the frame to have a better look at it. Comparing it to the lock that still worked, I found a little plastic piece that had been holding the lock in the open position was now broken in two pieces, so the handle had nothing to grip to stay open.

I found an Instructable explaining the problem and a file to 3D print the tiny little plastic piece. Unable to justify buying a 3D printer just to print a Tic Tac sized piece, (though I tried!), I put the file on a thumb drive, filled in a request form and dropped both off to the Summerside Rotary Library with a $2 deposit. I received a phone call a week later to say the piece had been printed. The file actually prints two of the plastic pins, probably because each window has two locks. When I made the request I only needed one, but another pin broke on another window in that week, so I had all I needed for two repairs all for a toonie!

I’m not sure I’ve seen anything that had been 3D printed up close before this. The original piece was most likely injection moulded, so was smooth, but the 3D printed piece had ridges and wasn’t completely round. I couldn’t get the piece into the little slot in the lock at first, but carefully scraping a bit of a ridge off one side allowed it to slide in. Both locks now work perfectly.

Thanks to Gubutek for this nifty fix and my first satisfying dip into the future of fixing.

*Original broken white pin with green 3D printed replacement*

*Lock handle in proper position to accept tab on sash*

Best batteries ever made?

Last week I popped the first disc of the third season of Succession into my DVD player (the library is my Netflix) and pushed the play button on the remote. Nothing happened.

I took the battery cover off the back of the remote and did what I’ve done often over the past few years: twirled the batteries and tried again. I don’t understand why this worked because it seems totally bonkers, but twirling the batteries would somehow revive them. This time, though, nothing happened. I put some fresh batteries in and the remote worked, so my luck extending the useful life of the original batteries that came with the remote well past what I would have thought possible for cheap AA batteries had run out.

For, you see, I purchased the DVD recorder/player on January 14, 2006 at Future Shop in Charlottetown. We used it a lot for the first five years we had it because we had dialup internet until 2010 so streaming wasn’t possible. I would say the player is still used a few times a month, but mostly the remote just sits there and waits.

I will reluctantly drop the Greencells in a recycling container, but these cheapo batteries deserve to take a bow.

thelmaphillips.ca

Always looking for connections