Still Grazin' After All These Years

It's mid-July, but the weather has been chilly and grim here for a while now. There's no doubt that my  feelings about this are affected by where I'm spending my workdays right now - in a grimy building set in a truly bleak neighborhood - because ugly places look worse in bad weather.

But today we had some visitors across the street, and they lifted my spirits by their sheer incongruity: a herd of goats, whose herder must have gotten hired by either the city or the owner of the vacant lot this building overlooks, to graze back the tall brush and weeds before the fire season.

I took a break to walk across the street and say, Hey, goats. I was so pleased to see them. They made this place look wild and beautiful for a few minutes.