One of my cousins frequently emails to tell me what is going on at their house, and she titles them "Russell Road Post" after their road. I use various names for my emails back to her, depending on where I am living, and what the email is about. When the email is about her sister who lives in Las Vegas, the title will be Jones Blvd Observer, and if it's more about me, it'll be something like Brown Trout Times-Journal.

Las Vegas, up until about 2008 through 2012, was growing steadily. It is surrounded by federal government land, and once the feds started selling that land to developers back in the good days, the housing starts escalated, fed by the extremely lax mortgage lending rules in the sunny days of the Bush administration.

This made for lots of new streets to be named, and the naming was handled by the fire department since they were the ones who would be looking for those streets. The idea was that every street would have a unique name, so there'd be less confusion; none of this Hackberry Street, Hackberry Court, Hackberry Place like we see in Denver. I have to say, though, usually those Hackberries are all together, so if you find the street, the Court will likely be a cul de sac off of it, and the place will be right there nearby. But that's Denver. If Las Vegas went that route, they wouldn't be together, they'd be all over town.

When you need a lot of street names quickly, it must be hard to come up with them, and I think the Las Vegas Fire Department must have a random word generating software program. We are constantly amused by discovery of yet another silly street name, and they tend to pick a theme for a neighborhood.

Our favorite neighborhood to laugh at is not far from our house: Dancing Daffodil, Leapin' Lily, Golden Pedal (sic), Jumpin' Juniper are the street names. It sounds like a throwback to the flower child hippie times, doesn't it? There is no way I would even look at a house on a street with a silly name like that, much less buy one because I always picture myself having to spell it over the telephone to some customer service rep.

Today, I discovered a new street name: Oeste Vista Street. Oeste means 'west' in Spanish, and it's pronounced something like oo-estay with a hint of a W in there. So some folks who don't speak Spanish might say west-ay. There they'll be, the whole time they live on that street saying "it's west-ay, spelled o-e-s-t-e," and some woman in India will be trying to type it into her database and wondering why it's not spelled like it sounds. Not that she hasn't already been exposed to any number of crazy names.