A Factory Tour; Restaurant Recommendation

Monday was a pretty light day at the jobsite--we took the afternoon off to tour the client's factory--they are a manufacturer of OSB, or oriented strand board (colloquially known as chipboard or waferboard). It was an amazingly cool tour--they bring in truckloads of trees at one end, and pallets of OSB get sent out on flatbeds on the other side. The scale of the operation is what makes it so amazing--it's like those scenes in the Star Wars or Alien series, with small people walking among these gargantuan prehistoric-looking machines--"This is not a place built for the human scale." Mountains of wood in the yard, five-story high heat pressing machines, dual tree debarking units... we walked around on catwalks hanging off the sides of the machines' structures. They didn't let us take cameras into the factory, but this is what it looks like from above:

The stacks of wood are the brown squares at the right; compare that scale to the cars in the parking lot. The yellow thing at the lower right is an overhead gantry crane that rolls back and forth over the pile with a grapple--it's like the world's largest claw vending machine/toy crane machine.

Our final dinner was at a place called Five and Ten--it turns out that the head chef is the brother of an English professor at the university I go to. It was incredibly good--I strongly recommend it if you find yourself in Athens. They serve carefully selected and matched cheese/fruit (or other accompaniment) platters--I really need to see if I can find some cave-aged Gruyere around here.

As a side note, a stray kitten wandered over to the test hut and decided to stay. A real cutie, but I couldn't take her home... hope they find a place for her all right--she was very friendly.