Hi, neighbor

The weather here has been gorgeous lately--about 85 degrees, not too humid and breezy. The wind has meant that it's been really clear so we could see our surrounding mountain ranges. Some days it's so hazy we can't see anything at all, and then the next day it's like mountains suddenly sprouted overnight.

Anyway, the clear weather has made for some unusually beautiful sunsets. Saturday evening we packed up the camera and drove through our neighborhood to a huge abandoned lot that has fantastic views of the western horizon. The property is surrounded by a fence, but the gates are open. We walked through some tall grasses, keeping a careful eye out for unsavory critters and avoiding random animal droppings, and found a clearing where we could set up the tripod.

The lot is abandoned but not empty. There's a massive house--mansion, really--that sits in the middle of it, unfinished and sad. After I had taken several dozen shots of the sunset, it was getting pretty dark and we decided to leave before we had to blindly stumble through the brush with no light. As I was getting ready to pack up, Travis said, "Hey. I figured out where the random animal doots came from."

It turns out the house, incomplete and desolate as it was, was not uninhabited.

Standing in the open doorway, staring curiously at us, was a family of goats.