Refinery at Sunset, Chatting With a Stranger

[stormdog]

I went to that little spot at the end of Cherry Drive again where I met a woman and her elderly mother who were there with their Chihuahua. We chatted for about half an hour about all sorts of stuff. I showed her pictures of my animals, talked about the fire, my bike, my animals, where I'd lived, and stuff. It was nice.

It was hard to photograph the sunset on my phone, but I do mostly like this one. That's the Co-op Refinery in the background. Most of bright spots on it are just lights, but that's a flame at the top of the stack that is the fourth structure from the left of the frame.

Thinking of doing more sunset photography may be the first time I've thought with any significant motivation about bringing my surviving camera out of the apartment with me since the fire.

I wish I'd found this little spot earlier than the week before moving. It feels kind of special and I'm going to miss it.

Comments

[acelightning73]

The flame often seen on many oil refineries is the "burnoff flare". Gases may come out of the petroleum as it gets processed, and one refinery I once toured told us "We don't burn off anything- we concentrate it and refine it and sell it to someone who has a use for it. (Another refinery just burns it off because it's cheaper than paying the fines for the vapors that get emitted.) Sometimes you see the flare flaming up very high and then going dim again, in response to some internal industrial rhythm I don't understand. Maybe I should have beeen a chemist.

[stormdog]

I love building big refineries when playing Factorio. I love infrastructure in general and learning about how it works. If I hadn't been too neurodivergent and too hindered by not realizing I was a girl to do well in high school, I think I could have been an engineer or architect or something.

My great-grandfather was a chemist. He was head of Portland Cement Association's research department.