A welcome change, part II

24 days. The weather forecast was wrong, and it was still over 90 yesterday. But not today, and now we're in the middle of a big hail storm. Funny place.

A welcome change

I have just woken up to find it cool and a little cloudy. In Scotland that would be just any summer morning (actually, it would be a particularly fine summer morning), but here it's newsworthy. Today is supposed to break our run of 23 days with temperatures hitting 90˚F or above - that's five days longer than the 1874/1901 record, according to the Rocky Mountain News. Not only that, but in measures closer to my own brain and heart, today is predicted to be under 30˚C. Hurray!

Street names

I made a startling discovery a couple of days ago. I'm house-sitting out in the west of Denver, and as I cycled back here from my office I was thinking about the names of the streets I passed. Everyone knows from films and TV about the American convention of specifying places by the intersecting streets: "14th and Broadway," for instance, often with one of the streets going by a number, as here. I thought it very strange when I was younger, especially having numbers for streets - though it seemed less strange after I'd been to Japan, where streets don't usually get either a name or number (in Japanese cities everything is divided into "towns," and then you get numbers to specify which district, which block, and then the house or building number. To make this as confusing as possible, the numbers of blocks in particular often come in no logical order. It's good to have a detailed map). In any case, it all made much more sense once I came to this country and discovered that pretty much every town and city is built on a grid pattern, so that Colfax (Colfax Avenue, but no-one ever uses the latter parts of street names much), for instance, runs right through Denver from east to west, and a street like Washington, running north to south, might get broken lots of times along the way, but can always be picked up again. Naming by numbers turns out to be pretty useful, too. If you're told that something is on 115th and Sheridan, for instance, you know just how far away that's going to be, and in what direction.

In Denver, Colfax is equivalent to 15th - the streets parallel to it are numbered, down to 1st (obviously), and up to... looks like 168th, perhaps, somewhere way north of the city limits. But my startling discovery is nothing to do with numbers - it's to do with the other names. If you're travelling around the city, you'll pick up quickly on the way that a series of parallel streets will often be named by some kind of theme (and this is true in other cities too, from what I've seen). Some are immediately obvious. Names of states: Mississippi, Arizona, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida. Names of famous colleges and universities: Vassar, Yale, Amherst, Bates, Cornell. Some are less obvious. Names of presidents (I think): Lincoln, Sherman, Grant (no - I'm wrong. I finally looked it up. Sherman and Grant were Generals for Lincoln. Shows what I know of Civil War history). Because of this I often keep myself amused by trying to think of possible links as I pass streets. In this case, I passed Quitman - no idea who that is. Then I had Raleigh and Stuart. I could link them - British history: Sir Walter Raleigh, and the Stuart dynasty (well, Raleigh served under the last Tudor, but not everything has to be perfect in this game). Then Tennyson - OK, British poet. Then... Utica, American place-name, spoiling it all. And either there, or on Vrain, I suddenly had it.

Are you sitting there feeling smug that you could see something here that it took me a year to notice? I'd like you to bear in mind that I've just written all of these down for you side by side, whereas I'm usually driving past them - since though I now find it is a general rule over most of the city, the central area in which I live and walk around seems to be an exception.

Now I have to go and look at maps of other American cities, and see if this is something peculiar to Denver.