We hear so often about how our healthcare system is falling apart, it’s important to report on instances where it actually works pretty well. For the last week my right ear has felt a little funky, and today it started to feel even funkier and, although I’ve never had an ear infection before, it felt sort of what I thought an ear infection might feel like.

So I called up the Friendly Pharmacy to see if their walk-in clinic was open today. It was, and the person on the phone said it was “very light today.” So I called myself a cab and was there in 10 minutes.

There was nobody else in the waiting room, and the clerk took my details and showed me right into an exam room. Five minutes later the doctor was looking in my ears, and five minutes after that I was at the pharmacy counter filling a prescription for Nasonex which, the doctor says, should clear up my not-too-infected-yet ear.

I was back in a cab and at home within an hour of this all starting.

Speaking of Rob MacDonald, Island Eye for the From Away Guy is a classic Sketch-22 video made more interesting still by the opportunity to see Matt Rainnie before he made the transition from a Jack Black body to an Adrian Brody body (giving hope to all we schlumpy men).

Good news from Rob MacDonald as the Eastern School District consultation process marches on.

Reading aloud chapter 17 of The Prophet of Yonwood to Oliver tonight I realized that my reading-aloud-to-children voice is patterned on Stuart McLean’s storytelling style. It was all rather disconcerting. Try listening to this Vinyl Café episode to get an idea of what I’m talking about. It’s all about the breathing.

I was up on the University of PEI campus this morning for my regular philosophy with a dash of fitness, and then adjourned from those pursuits to share lunch with Don Moses, chief engineer of the Island Lives project.

Having experienced the cafeterias in the Student Centre and in the Vet College already, I insisted that we eat at the Wanda Wyatt Dining Hall. Although Don hadn’t been there before, he insisted that it was a clone of the other cafeterias, and that there’d be nothing new to see there. He was wrong.

While the other cafeterias are standard old “order from the menu, pay for what you order” style, the Wanda Wyatt is a full-on “meal plan”-style dining hall: you pay one price — $10.80 with tax — and then go to town, ordering anything and everything you’d like: salad, soup, main, dessert, coffee, and so on.

And the food wasn’t bad: I had a tasty pasta salad with raisins, apples and feta cheese to start, followed by a passable apple-lentil curry and then a chocolate square and a dish of mandarin oranges for dessert.

I shall return.

Remember back in the 70s¹ when I posted about how we should all have our own domain names and then held a workshop to walk the interested through the process?

Well Spark picked up the notion this week and we taped an interview over the ISDN from CBC Charlottetown to CBC Toronto this afternoon. Thanks to the quick work in the Spark boiler room, you can listen to the raw interview now, mere hours later. Spark will follow with a blog post on Thursday, and the real live radio show will swallow the edited audio later.

I arrived early at CBC for the taping and thus got to spend a pleasant 20 minutes chatting about broadcast audio with the inimitable Kenny Adams. If I ever decide to paddle across the Atlantic in a canoe, and need someone to arrange a live audio remote from the Sargasso Sea, Kenny is my man.

1. by “the 70s” I mean “last year at this time.”

The University of PEI, like many of us, is hunkering down, and has cast a Budget Taskforce that’s accepting suggestions “on ways to increase operating revenues and decrease costs.” This is a laudable exercise. Unfortunately, they’ve decided only to accept input from those inside the institution (emphasis mine):

This is a concrete example of why UPEI needs to broaden its definition of what constitutes membership in the institution. I’ve got several ideas that I think might benefit the taskforce and I’m sure there are many other Islanders who would be willing and eager to help the institution thrive economically. Alas it seems they don’t want to listen to those outside the walls.

Carol Horne at Tourism PEI is recruiting via Twitter:

looking for summer Familiarization Tour Guide - someone who knows and loves PEI and can explain it to media and who likes to work long hours

Henry Smith built the house we live in at 100 Prince Street over 180 years ago in 1827. Thirty-two years later he and his family sailed for New Zealand, never to return. Through the generosity of a descendant, there’s a photograph of Smith in the Public Archives:

Photograph is from the collection of the Public Archives and Records Office of Prince Edward Island, (P0002679 - Acc5015/9 - Henry Smith).