Tuesday, January 29, 2008

If it's Tuesday, it must be.......

Takin' It To the Streets Tuesday!

I live in a community of subdivisions. Ten or twelve years ago where I live was open desert. (I know, very bad. I don't like that at all.) Now it's 10,000 or thereabouts people, almost all living in subdivisions. Subdivisions with names like Horizons, Sunrise Meadows, and Rancho Antigua. And street names, well, street names that frankly suck. A lot. Pale Blue Opal Drive? That is just sad.

Tess and I took photos yesterday of some of the street names in our neighborhood. Really rather horrible and not so very bad, weird and long. Really long names, some of them...

First there's the semi-precious streets:


I especially like this one -- Yogo Sapphire. I googled it and found it is a sapphire mined in Yogo Gulch, Montana. Woot.




Then there are the long and sometimes hard to pronounce names, the Spanish and the huh? Where did they get that name and why would they choose it? Like this one...

I like Via Elemental, but Paseo Del Parque? I googled, and apparently Parque means park. Did you know that? Neither did I. I also don't know how to pronounce it, but I bet it's a pain to get people to spell it right...


I like some of the Spanish names, and they make sense, since we are in Tucson, but still. I would hate to write them as my return address. I used to live on Elm St. Five letters. My current street has four times the letters (and is a "gay" name, according to certain rather sometimes juvenile members of my family):


The other streets in my subdivision are Hummingbird Meadow, Canyon Meadow, Sunrise Meadow, and Sunset Meadow. Do they have meadows in the desert?

There are some that seem to fit Tucson...


And some that are more, well, generic.







We may be revisiting this on future Tuesdays, since I have barely scratched the surface of um...different street names...

14 comments:

  1. I live in an hillside area of Glendale, CA which was built out 83 years ago. Someone figured that colleges made excellent street names in a city that only had a community college which was 10 miles from the area.

    So, we have Harvard, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, Columbia, Yale, Princeton, etc.

    I live on Wellesley.

    Maybe they're just running out of easy ones!!

    Oh, and I love the new sig line at MLW. And now I'm racking my brain for a QOTD.

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  2. That was fun!...hey, are you my neighbor?

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  3. One of the subdivisions has Willow streets -- all the streets are named after some kind of willow. Apparently the HOA covenant has a clause stating that you cannot plant willow trees there. Weird...

    QOTD is becoming a big pain...

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  4. Rhonda, I live in Tucson! Am I your neighbor?

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  5. OMG - kinda!! I'm in Peoria -- NW side of Phoenix. How weird is that?! Yay - now come on over -- I talked about you on my latest post. ... you don't have to drive over...just copy and past this URL into that spot where it goes on your computer: http://rnning2wn2.blogspot.com/2008/01/take-test-i-know-you-want-to.html.

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  6. Anonymous2:53 AM

    Laughing.

    Tuesdays rock.

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  7. Don't you just love the "theme" neighborhoods. My sis lives in the "mountains" where the street names are things like Rushmore, Capulan, Everest, etc. There's the tree section of Elm, Birch, Willow, Oak, etc. Personally, I like one small town that has all streets laid out on a grid so the streets going one direction are all letters, the cross streets are all numbers! How simple is that!

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  8. Donna, I grew up on Maple Street, next to Spruce, Oak, Ash and Elm Streets. And our main street through town was in fact Main Street. Traditional, nice, and easy to spell. Not a bad thing for a street name.

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  9. I once lived on "Oak Forest Spur Drive" and I hated writing that down. Now we live on Elizabeth - that sounds a little wrong, huh?

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  10. Oak Forest Spur Drive? Weird.

    And really, you should get off Elizabeth. What did she ever do to you?

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  11. hehehehe Great Tuesday post...

    I think that I would get the giggles if I lived on Eraseo del tornasol

    or Via de las estacas..

    in fact I have a pretty good case of the giggles now..

    cheers kim xx

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  12. Neighbors to the south of us, on the first cross street, live on "Easy Street" and then there's "Serendipity Drive" and "Harmony Lane". I think the developer might have been gay. Not that there's anything wrong with being gay - unless, of course, you're naming the streets in your subdivision.

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  13. lceel -- that is very funny! The developers must run out of ideas, or else they are just sadistic.

    Around here they are fond of culs de sac, and naming those culs de sac after the cross street -- so we have Sunrise Meadow Drive, and Sunrise Meadow Place. One would think they could come up with one more Meadow...

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  14. Okay, I'm way behind on reading blogs and commenting. But I loved this blog and all the comments it spawned. I live in a subdivision called Palm Village. But the name of my street is Hedge Rose Drive or Hedgerose depending on who is writing it. We haven't be able to find out the correct way yet but we've only lived here six months.

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