American in Spain

Four Goats

September 11, 2006

This morning, Marga had to give an important presentation to some very powerful clients at her work. The presentation slides are beautiful. I made them for her in Keynote, which I now consider to be far better than Powerpoint. The presentation was exported to a Quicktime movie that could be played on the Windows laptop at work. About an hour after Marga left the house, I got a call asking me to come help because the laptop was "locked up". So I got reasonably well dressed, burned a copy of the presentation to a CD (in case the copy she had on the USB pen drive was corrupt), grabbed my laptop for backup, and headed out the door. It's a 15 minute walk to her work. Normally she walks, but today she drove to avoid drizzle frizzle (my female readers will understand). When I got halfway there, one of her coworkers that I know honked at me, stopped his car, and told me to hop in. He had been sent to find me a.s.a.p. to bring me in, even though the presentation wasn't for another 90 minutes. When I finally got there, the problem took me all of about 45 seconds to solve. When Quicktime went to fullscreen mode, it got confused trying to be full screen on two different resolutions (the laptop screen and the huge flatscreen tv). The solution involved changing the laptop to only display on the external display. I was thanked and sent on my way. No payment of free anchovies (what am I, a cat?) like last time. So off I went.

The path back home took me by one of the half-dozen uninhabited, decaying mansions in Colindres. I glaced through the fence and saw the strangest sight. As far as I know the wall around this house is completely closed off and quite high.

Four Goats

They stared at me for the whole 45 seconds that I watched them. I don't know if they had gotten out of where they were supposed to be and gotten into this high grass, or if their bipedal master put them there. Either way, it was not what I was expecting to see when I looked through the fence.