'Til Tuesday.

Kirk: You left port without a tractor beam?
Harriman: It doesn't arrive until Tuesday.
-from Star Trek: Generations.

That's a running theme in the movie; that the ship's not ready and nothing can be accomplished because the systems, supplies, and people don't arrive until Tuesday.

Sunday, I'm driving home from the grocery store through Warm Fork Park. I notice something out of place lying on the ground between the trash and the bathroom. Something dead.

Not just dead. Skinned. And from that perspective, it looked like it COULD have been a baby.

I stopped the car and jumped out to investigate. It wasn't a baby. It was a bunch of animals. I couldn't readily identify what kind of animals, but the size, shape, and brown fur on their unskinned feet made me think they might have been dogs. There were four of them on the ground, and one in the trash.

Someone had dumped them there. In the park. Where children play. It was extremely gross.

I hopped back in my little car and went to the police station. The dispatcher, a guy I'd guess is in his late fifties or early sixties, was the only one there. "May I help you?" he asked.

"Yeah," I replied. "Someone has skinned some animals and dumped them in the Warm Fork park."

"Oh, those are 'coons," he informed me. "We know about them, but nobody can do anything about cleaning them up until Tuesday."

This was Sunday, mind you. Two problems with waiting until Tuesday come to mind.

1. Children play there. The ghoulish death-grimaces of skinned animals will give them nightmares. And the likelihood that more children than usual would be playing there was a real one, because Thayer schools don't end their Christmas break until midweek.

2. Dead things decay over time. This might not be a big problem if these were normal January temperatures, but with daytime temperatures approaching 60, those things are quickly going to get nasty. It would take five minutes for a city employee to shovel them up and put them in a dumpster somewhere, but by waiting those extra two days, the corpses will turn into a soupy, maggoty, stench-riddled, ten-times-harder-to-clean mess.

But nobody can do anything about it until Tuesday. It was a holiday weekend, and apparently no city employees were on call.

I went home and grabbed my cheap disposable camera and returned to the park, where farther up the walking path I found ANOTHER one. Took about ten pics. Dropped them off at Wally World. The pictures are supposed to be ready tonight. I'll try and get at least SOME of them scanned and post them tomorrow.

This morning . . . this WEDNESDAY morning, mind you, I drove through Warm Fork park. They're still there.

Hey, the dispatcher didn't say WHICH Tuesday.

Maybe I'll blow a couple of them up to billboard size and put on captions such as "Welcome to scenic Warm Fork Park." Or "This is the face of Thayer city government."