It's been a very un-newsworthy ten days of coughing (but not Covid), during which we've done nothing much except (in my case) finish Medium Granddaughter's dragon quilt. It's very bright and a bit higgledy-piggledy and not at all adventurous in any technical way, but was nice and easy to make.
I carefully used up more or less all the dragon fabric I'd bought - the big rainbow dragons, the much smaller but also multi-coloured ones and the dark blue - and had fun putting in some other favourite materials, quilting lots of hearts and such like. And then Big Granddaughter said she wanted a dragon quilt too so I had to get some more dragon fabric to make hers, next year.
For the back, I used bits and pieces. So thrifty... .
And after we'd started coughing a lot less, we had a flying visit from Daughter 2 and a friend this weekend, and also Son and family. Here he is, having transmogrified from Dr D to Mr Criminalsson, a change which sees him pursued round the garden by Superwoman and Santa, ie his son and his nephew, who are policemen. They catch him; he escapes; they chase him again. It's a simple game but hey, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a novel about something similar.
I was intrigued by what Frances said in a comment about English "streets" being different from English "roads". I don't live in England, but I don't think they are. (Are they?) One can live on either. I suppose the big ones - motorways and such - are always roads rather than streets, but roads can also be small. I think both tend to be a bit bigger than those called Close, Gardens, View, Terrace, Avenue... but not necessarily. And you would probably talk about "the main road" in a town and "the main street" in a village, so I suppose that would be because of their size. But one could have houses on either.
I'm wondering if this is a case of my yesterdays being other's antiquities. It came from my English aunt, who was 78 when I met her in 1971. Perhaps it was already an out of date usage. But, would the title have carried the same ambience if Lily Rose had been part of The Family at One End Road? Aside: my Australian compatriots enjoyed my aunt's address "Rough Common Road" as two adjectives + noun and delighted in inserting a comma between them.
ReplyDeleteI think of street and road as being synonymous except in an address: road, street and avenue are completely different things. I've had that same cough--nasty! I'm glad you're over it.
ReplyDeleteOoooh, I love the quilt -- Well Done Granny! The colors are beautiful -- especially the blues! Interesting comments about streets and roads. We probably use street for smaller roads in neighborhoods and roads are a little bigger -- the roads used to get from one neighborhood to another? For example, I think we'd call the cul-de-sac where you live a street, but the road where you catch the bus would be a road. And Avenue is really never used unless it's part of the name, as in 5th Avenue in NYC. But who knows, everyone probably has their own rules. It's like, what do you call those fizzy drinks that people drink? Soda? Pop? Soft Drink? Coke? ("Coke" can be used for them even if they're not made by the Coca-Cola corporation -- sort of like we say "Xerox copy" even though the machine isn't a Xerox machine.) Oooh, you've opened up a can of worms -- there are lots of words that sort of mean the same thing ... ;-D
ReplyDeleteHello there - it has been a very, very long time since I blogged or even read many blogs. I used to read and comment on your blog way back when the grandchildren were just appearing on the scene. Imagine my surprise that the eldest is 11. This summer the hubbler and I were able to finally make our 30th anniversary trip which we had planned for Summer 2020. We arrived in Edinburgh for a couple of days before taking the train to the Lake District and then driving around in a camper van for 10 days. We then reversed and came back to Ediburgh, staying in a Georgian flat a couple of blocks from Holyrood, and we arrived in time to see all the poshly dressed people arriving for the Queen's garden party. While there we enjoyed hiking Arthur's seat and seeing both New an old town, the Royal mile, tea at the parliament building - it was just lovely. And I often thought about you - which prompted me to finally dig through my stuff to try to find my old blog as well as yours and voila! So glad you are still blogging, and to "catch up" on your news and see that for the most part, things seem well. we loved Edinburgh and had a truly delightful visit - we missed the worst heat and the rain and managed almost 3 weeks of what to us was perfect summer weather (being from the southern US where summer heat is always 30+C. ) We enjoyed "hill walking" which we were soon to discover wasn't really hill walking but did include much scrambling up and down rocky places - but OOOHHH so worth it - we did Old Man Coniston and Cat Bells and lots and lots of walking between towns and ..mmm the memories sustain me to this day as I slog through another year of teaching math. Anyway, delighted to find you again!
ReplyDeleteI do love that quilt! Nothing too fussy to piece together and yet the fabric(s) make it very colorful and interesting to look at. Over across the Pond here, Street, Road, Avenue etc., can have a different meaning depending on where you are. They are supposed to have different meanings and be descriptive of size or orientation, but that can change from North to South or State to State. The silliest thing to me is out here in South Dakota; the rural areas have designations as a Street being of East-West orientation, and Road being North-South! And this is regardless of size or busyness. To me, a street is a through-way in a neighborhood, a road is a busier way connecting neighborhoods or towns, and an Avenue is supposed to have a grass area down the middle (but most don't anymore as I am on an avenue and there is no grass center median). Evolving language, again....
ReplyDeleteRoads and streets - I did some work for Transport for London on the coordination of 'street works', which is the technical term in England for digging holes in any sort of public thoroughfare. They wanted to copy the Scottish system, but not the Scottish terminology, which is 'road works'. But in common parlance, here in England anything wide enough to drive along is a 'road', but a 'street' is usually a road in a built-up area. However, the long-distance highways originally built by the Romans have names like Stane Street and Ermine Street.
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