Leta and VLOC get some ink in the Post for this week's Gilbert & Sullivan sing-out. Leta disclaims that she hasn't been on the VLOC board for some time.

posted: 7:41:39 PM  

Appearances and disappearances:

The same blue Nissan had been parked in the unreserved space next to my reserved one since Thanksgiving. I ran across a couple of my neighbors trying to budge it one evening a few months ago: lots of fumbling in the dark with flashlights under the hood. The car's tags and safety inspection had expired at the end of July. Lucy Liu grinned at me from the fading cover of an issue of Maxim lying on the back seat.

Yesterday evening, when I arrived home, the car was gone. Towed, I suspect, by the civil authorities or otherwise. It's left a ghost behind: more than half a year of street debris that had never washed away while the parking space was unoccupied during the day. Four footprints where the grime accumulated around the wheels.

I had fallen into the habit of lining up on the Nissan as I approached my parking space. Now I'm a little bit lost: how can I find my space?

This morning, the corpse of a road-killed fox lay on South Lakes Drive at the entrance to my cluster. It was identifiable as such by its Mr. Spock ears and delicate brown-dipped paws. From the state of its abdomen, it had already provided a snack to the local crow population. There are strips and patches of woods in my suburb, but I didn't figure that they were wild enough to support an edge-dwelling predator like a fox.

By the time I returned from work in the evening, the remnants of the fox were gone. Who cleaned it up?

posted: 7:38:58 PM