My husband and I are on Day 4 of not leaving the house except to walk around the backyard. We did stock up for two weeks a week or so ago and then added in milk powder and more cans/bottles/dried stuff to take us to one month. On Day 4 one month still seems like a long way away - April 12. We had thought on my husband's birthday we might go to Mandarin for their buffet as that is one of his favourite restaurants (there are many that he enjoys). However, they are doing take-out so still doable if we are still isolating ourselves on the 16th of April. I am 74 and he will be 77 so following the Guidelines suggested by Public Health. We haven't traveled out of the country or province for two years now. It is fun to go south in the winter for a week but we need to stay closer to home because of Ed's health and I actually enjoy the snow. Not quite so easy for me to manage as it once was but I can still shovel and chop ice when I need to. But the views are fabulous and I never tire of them.
It is snowing here today and it looks like we have 5 centimetres already and it comes down light and then heavy periodically. Since we were only supposed to get 1 to 2 centimetres no ideas on how much we might actually get. Snowstorms in March can often be quite heavy but I find it not to be too arduous since we know that spring is coming one of these days. Snow into April quite common but it is actually melting in between now.
My new Fit Bit for Christmas has been great. I am managing 135 minutes of identified exercise a day with 60 to 80 minutes being very active and the rest medium activity (walking and calisthenics). I am an exercise fiend my husband always says and I must admit I do enjoy a good run although do most of my running indoors these days. There are so many exercise videos these days - I have at least ten different ones to choose from. I do Yoga sometimes but prefer cardio more.
It will be interesting to look back on these blogs if God grants me longer days into the future. I think I might blog my way through this COVID-19 pandemic. I have been busy doing my bi-yearly rephasing of my grandparent's DNA.
I am starting to get interested in who my paternal grandmother's father may have been as I acquire more and more matches on the Rawlings-Taylor side. I have two mysteries as my maternal grandmother's mother was Ellen Taylor born in Birmingham circa 1850 according to the census and her death registration. Plus my grandmother remembered her mother very well (she was eleven when her mother died of pneumonia at the age of 37 years). So I had both the death registration which gave her age as 37 years and my grandmother's memory. All of us (my four siblings and myself having tested out of a block of seven siblings) show some Irish DNA and family lore does give Ellen Taylor an Irish back ground (she was very pale with dark hair that had red highlights). She sang Irish lullabies to her children with Danny Boy being the one she often sang and which was one of my grandmother's favourite songs. I do have possible parents for her but her six siblings can not be easily located on the census. Perhaps in this month of isolation I will have a very controlled look at the DNA and see if I can do any selective placement of matches into these two family lines - Taylor for my maternal great-grandmother and Rawling-Taylor matches that do not fit into the known Rawling-Taylor matches that I can place into my known family. My grandmother's birth name was Ada Bessie Cotteril Rawlings when she was born in 1876 but on the 1881 census she is referred to as Ada Rawlings living with her grandparents William Rawlings and Elizabeth (Lywood) Rawlings. On the 1891 census she is referred to as Bessie Taylor living with her mother and stepfather Elizabeth (Rawlings) Taylor and William Taylor. On the 1901 census she is listed as Edith B Taylor and then at the time of her marriage Edith Bessie Taylor. One of my Australian cousins who grew up in Wiltshire where the family lived said that "Ada" would easily have been written down as Edith by a census taker. My father was baptized at the same Church as his mother by the same priest. There was only one Cotterill family in the parish at the time that my grandmother was conceived/born. I need to check and see if any of the descendants of this family are matching me or my siblings. There is an interesting medical side to this as well that I have noted but not really looked at in depth. Perhaps in this month ahead of me I will spend a little time looking. My grandfather always said that my grandmother was very happy as a child.
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