two weeks ago i had the Best Day Ever but i haven’t had time to write about it until now. actually, it was really the one thing that put me in an awesome mood and everything else was just gravy.

a few weeks ago i wrote a php cms application for a website my new company had built awhile ago. dawn and i hit the road for indiana to meet with the client; she was taking photographs of their newest piece of equipment doing its thing and i had to present my app’s user guide and do a little training. the company in question works in the recycling industry and has developed some processes to make aluminum reclaimation much more environmentally-friendly. i had never been to an industrial facility before and i was excited – my appetite whet by previously-taken photos of giant aluminum-melting furnaces and yellow-hot metals flowing and sparking like something out of T2.

one of our contacts at this company is an incredibly sweet german guy named karl (*name changed to that of two of my friends’ older brother’s name to keep me from getting dooced, even though everything i have to say is basically about how awesome everything about this company is and you could totally figure out who/what i’m talking about if you really wanted to, but hey – i’m making an effort here.). karl had a friend in from germany who was also visiting the plant for the first time. dawn got her camera ready and we put on our hard hats (!!!) and followed karl out into the cold drizzly rain.

the company’s buildings are arranged in a big U and we emerged from the inner right arm of the U. our destination was the building at the base of the U. the entire space inside the U is filled with rows of hundreds of pressure gauges and huge pre-fab parts of as-yet-unknown metal structures. on the far side of the yard were about 6 tall perfect white cylinders, their bottoms fenced in with lots of pipes snaking everywhere between them and a tall dark grey rectangular building on stilts. the air rumbled with the muffled sub-bass of giant machinery – a steady grating throbbing of moving parts and rushing air like an old steam train idling in a station or a giant bellows being pumped by one of those cave trolls from lotr. we wove our way between 6 foot tall sections of pipe as thick fog billowed across our path and clung to bottoms of racks of gauges and our ankles.

seeing that fog is the most surreal moment i think i’ve ever had. it was cold outside – maybe 40° – and i couldn’t feel any heat emanating from the plant’s opening (door or hatch doesn’t sufficiently describe how gaping and huge it was) so the fog felt like…magic. like the beginning of a story where the characters journey to a strange new land and see things that no one has dreamt of before – the moment just before an explorer realizes he’s found a place that isn’t on any map. this was my mindset when i stepped out of the gray rain and into the plant’s black interior.

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