Social distancing 2020

I thought I would share a few thoughts at two weeks into our experience with the COVID 19 pandemic.

The panic shopping seems to have eased a bit, but I am still surprised at some of the items missing from grocery store shelves. Fresh produce is readily available, but the pasta shelves are bare. Milk seems to be in good supply but there are no eggs.  Sugar and flour are in short supply. Meat counters are full but chicken and ground beef are scarce. Most interesting to me is that the mayonaise shelf was bare.

At our house life goes on pretty much as usual. Since I don't have any committments on my time I started the ever looming project of organizing 40+ years of unfiled photographs.  My study looks like a hurricane has hit, but I'm actually making some progress on the project. 

 The message here is that we have had WHOLE LOT OF FUN in our family over the years.

Beyond the house walking is still open to us.  Calvin and I have taken several walks along the Truckee and in the Truckee River Canyon.

It looks pretty wintery here still, but we have hopes for warmer weather next week. Other days I take my usual walk around Virginia Lake.  This is what social distancing looks like there, but that is pretty much what it look like all the time.

The only diffrence now is that there is a sign stating that the playground is closed, which gets some compliance, but not total.

RootsTech 2020

In February I attended my 10th RootsTech Conference. As usual, it was a great experience and I learned so many new things.  It is always a bit of a mob...

and this year with the Corona Virus concerns it seemed like a perfect breeding ground, but I carefully followed instructions (posted everywhere)

 and managed to come home without any new germs. I attend classes from 8 am to 5pm, but managed to get outside a couple of times during the lunch hour.  I was interested to see what was happening on Temple Square. The temple looks just the same from the east (my favorite view)

but the entire southeast quadrant is a construction pit now. This is the view looking west

and this is the view looking east

There was scaffolding on the south side and missing windows.

The Tabernacle and Assembly Hall were still open but the rest is a major construction zone.

I got to go to the Church History Museums exhibit on Women's suffrage in Utah. 

Wyoming territory gave women the right to vote in December 1869, but Utah women were the first to actually cast a vote in a United States election on August 1, 1870. I looked at my family tree and it appears that only Lucy Nutting Ferguson and her daughter Julia Ferguson Brown would have been able to vote. I hope they did! My other grandmothers were born in foreign countries and so wouldn't have been citizens. Women lost the right to vote in Utah in 1887 when the Edmonds-Tucker Act disenfranchised all women.

And that is your history lesson for today