Mormons Didn't Plan This Town

One of the biggest shocks in moving to Tucson was the fact that Mormons did not build this town. I have lived in Mesa all my life, and so I grew up with a perfect street naming system.

• Center of town: Center & Main.
• All of the east/west residential street names run in alphabetical order, starting with A at Main Street (Avenues south of Main, Streets north of Main).
• All miles are exactly 800 numbers apart from each other.
• Even numbers on the north & west sides of the street / odd numbers on the south & east sides of the street
• If you're near 6th Street, you're near 600 North

It's beautiful. And then I came to Tucson. Here is an example of Tucson's addresses:

Notice that 202 is between 5th Avenue & 6th Avenue. Another example: one of the main roads in town is 22nd Street, which is not 2200 south, it's 1100 south (and no, not all of the street numbers are exactly half of the street names). It's very annoying if you are looking for an address. Another annoying feature: odd & even address run on both sides of the road.

However, Tucson traffic cannot even be compared to Valley traffic. It is WONDERFUL. Rush hour traffic is very minimal. Plus we have lagging left turn arrows which are far superior in my opinion. Anyway, I'm guessing Phoenix/Mesa traffic is worse than Tucson's traffic because people couldn't stand figuring out how to get anywhere in Tucson, so they moved to Mormonland.

Elephant

So, why is this blog called "Elephant Droppings"? It's not as bad as it sounds. In my husband Jake's past life, he gave everyone he knew nicknames, and a majority of the time, they were animal names. Jake is a spider because he liked to rock climb (again, a past life activity). When he met me, he was always in complete amazement at my great memory, so my nickname "Elephant" was born. It has nothing to do with the color of my skin, the size of my ears, or my weight, for those of you wondering.

My House

I live on a street with a 13-letter name. It's the longest name in street-naming history. I'm just glad it's not "Avenida de la Ortega" or something like that. Those names are very common here in Tucson. I love my house here on 13-lettered street. It's our first house and it's almost 3 times as big as our last apartment. You could see our entire apartment from the front door. We didn't even have room for a table in it. Now, we have 3 bedrooms plus a den to furnish. It's wonderful. Not only that, but we got to experiment with paint on the walls.

One of the selling points for us on this house was our view from our back door. Our house backs up to a mountain, and we will never have any back door neighbors, just our mountain. This is a sunset we had one evening in our back yard.



We've now lived in Tuscon for 5 months. Time has gone by really fast. Jake is in his 2nd semester of Law School at the U of A. He really likes the school and the style of teaching and the kids in his class. He even plays basketball and football with them in their spare time.

I'm a Blogger

I think it all started with MySpace. I heard about MySpace like 2 months ago. That's how much I get in to internet things. Anyway, I decided I had to join simply for the ability to share pictures of my Halloween Party with my friends, since I live so far away. So, I joined and I'm addicted. Mostly because I feel like I still have friends and I can keep up in their lives.

The funny thing about MySpace, is that it sounds so dorky. "Oh, I have a profile of myself on the internet". I don't think I could get away with that a couple years ago. It sounds too much like internet dating.

That's kind of how I felt about blogging too. Actually, I didn't feel too much of anything about blogging because I didn't know anyone who did it or what it was all about.

But I think I'm really going to enjoy it.