Where the heck has Dave been lately anyway?

I've been told by my reader that I have to blog something. I suppose it has been a while. I guess I just haven't been in the mood lately, but here goes...

I've been working on the Oregon Coast this week. If you have to travel for work, you could do worse. Most of the work this week is between Tillamook and Seaside, but I also had to make a run down to Newport. The weather's been on and off, but hey, it's Oregon.

Most of the work out here is at wastewater plants, but I worked at the Tillamook County Creamery the other day. It a dairy that makes awesome cheese and ice cream. I'm not sure how far away you can get it, but it's good stuff. Whenever I work there I have to check out the visitor area. It was raining which means the place was crawling with tourists, so I didn't bother to wait for the free samples. I did however need to check out the viewing area. There is a whole section overlooking the packaging floor where you can watch industrial stuff happen. I always love watching assembly line processes. In this area, 50 lb. blocks of fresh cheese come in one end, get cut to the right size, and packaged before rolling out the other end on conveyor belts. Just listening to the other watchers, it's amazing to me how little people understand machine-looking things. I admit that I might be more technically trained than the average Joe, but it's very comical listening to people guessing what various machines and workers are doing. I feel bad for the folks working on the floor down there too. Not only are they working a boring-ass production job wearing all white uniforms and hair nets, but every tourist in Oregon is watching them do it. Somebody next to me sang the Oompa Loompa song.

This morning I met a couple lab cats. Lab kittens actually. I almost stepped on one of them sitting in the doorway of the first lab of the day. Apparently, their mother was killed by a raccoon and one of the guys bottle-fed 5 kittens until they could eat. 2 of them now live there. They were a little cautious of me at first, but pretty quickly they decided it would be fun to play on my feet and equipment for the rest of the time I was there. I tried to grab a picture of them on my phone, but like toddlers, they didn't sit still for long.

I have been staying in Garibaldi for the last couple days. There's not much going on in Garibaldi. It's the main port/marina for Tillamook Bay, but there's not much more to it than that. The marina was about 1/3 commercial fishing boats, 1/3 charter fishing boats, and 1/3 personal boats that looked very small for the ocean, especially next to the other 2/3. There's a lumber mill here too, but not much else.

I ate at the Pirate's Cove, which is supposed to be the best restaurant in town. There are only like 2 or 3 other places anyway, so there's not much competition. The food was decent and it had a nice view of the bay, but that's about it. The service was slow and the atmosphere sucked. The Pirate's Cove sounds like it should be cool, but don't be fooled. It was vaguely nautical, but only with the kind of seashell cutesy crap that your grandmother might keep around (not YOUR grandmother, of course, but you know the kind of stuff I mean). Basically, I spent half as much and had a better time eating a burger at a local fisherman's dive bar across the street from the hotel the other night.

The bread was really good at the Pirate's Cove though and I ate WAY too much of it. Dummy.

I'll be finishing up out here tomorrow and heading back home for the weekend. Good thing too, 'cuz I miss Franny and the Mizz, and as he can now tell me on the phone, he misses me too. I don't know if he knows what it means, but he knows to tell me it on the phone anyway. I'll take it.