Inspired by this post over at Hit Coffee, I should point out two things that are good about the two municipal governments that I have noticed recently.
First, Soffit House is located on the very edge, but still within the municipal limits, of the city of Lancaster. Two weeks ago, The Wife and I were walking the dogs and noticed that the retaining wall outside one of our neighbor’s houses had been tagged with a large, ugly, gang-associated-looking graffito. I hadn’t noticed it driving home that day, so it must have only been a few hours old when we saw it. Well, the very next morning, a crew in a city truck was out there at the spot, applying paint remover and a new coat of fresh paint on the spot. It couldn’t have been up on the wall for eight hours, tops. I thought that was excellent response time and top-notch service from the city government.
Second, yesterday afternoon I saw a dead cat on the side of the road in an undeveloped section of the city in which my office is located. The unfortunate beast had been struck by someone’s car and flattened out to gossamer thinness by the traffic. I called him “Slim.”
This wasn’t in front of anyone’s house or business; both sides of the street are undeveloped desert. I think one side of the street is actually unincorporated land. But this morning, Slim The Unlucky Former Cat was gone; no trade of him was visible. Someone from the city (or maybe the county) had come by to scrape him up and hose the street down.
Now, I’ll grant that The Wife saw some coyotes out in the desert about a quarter mile from where Slim had met his demise. I didn’t associate the coyote sighting with my earlier, more grisly observation. So maybe they helped clean up Slim, but there would still have been bones, skin, fur, and probably a smear of viscera. So some human agent at minimum finished the job. And they got on it pretty fast. So good on for them.
NOTE: This blog post satisfies the GGV Challenge (“Graffito, Gossamer, and Viscera”) for coherent use of obscure words in context. I defy you to do better.
