About My New Job

I am working for a large, international aluminum product manufacturing plant, where we make rolled aluminum coils and sell them out to people that want to customize the stuff.  This company is not called Manuel's Mousepad Emporium (MME), but that's what I'm calling it so as to give myself one level of anonymity.  I am in the Health, Safety & Environmental department, where we have two staff environmental engineers and a handful of safety specialists.  My title is, officially, Environmental Compliance Technician.  I'm pretty sure that that is the most prestigious sounding job title I've ever had.

So what do I do?  To answer that would require a small understanding of the rolled product manufacturing facility itself and how the processes work.  In extreme brevity, MME buys recycled aluminum and melts it down to a certain level.  This molten aluminum goes through a casthouse until eventually it is poured into molds and cast as large (~22 feet long) ingots.  The ingots make their way through the mills, getting chopped and scalped and cut along the way.  Eventually they go through a machine that smashes the ingot down over and over, kind of like rolling a piece of clay in your hand until it is a long and thin snake, except the aluminum stays rectangular in shape and not round.  One the aluminum is flattened into a sheet it is then rolled up into a coil (~20,000 lbs.) and hauled off on a crate to sit and await shipping.  That's the short version.

MME also does customized sheets with embossed designs.  There's also a paint process if customers want colored aluminum (and many of them do).

So what do I do?  I basically make sure that all the water that we're pushing out of the property is within the acceptable limits for a variety of things (coliform, chlorine, pH, oil & grease, etc.)  To do this requires a daily visible inspection of our main outfall and the waste water treatment outfall.  In addition to the regulations surrounding a WWTP, MME also has its own drinking water supply.  I am responsible for all the routine inspections of these areas.

Next I work with the waste side of environmental engineering.  There are a few hazardous byproducts left over and I have to make sure that they are properly labeled and disposed of correctly.  Non-hazardous and universal waste regulations also fall into this realm.  MME doesn't generate a lot of varieties hazardous waste, most of it being from paints and solvents.

The last piece of environmental that I deal with is the air side.  Air regulations are some of the most difficult things to understand and regulate.  I have several binders in my office on Air Regulations due to the Clean Air Act from the EPA and I have wracked my mind over the billion+ acronyms and numbers.  There's a lot of stuff that I don't understand right now, but eventually I'm going to have to know everything that pertains to the aluminum industry, or at least a portion of it.  I've not really got into this much yet, but it's coming so very soon.

The EPA has the authority to wage some monstrous fines on violations, so I'm employed to do the routine checks (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) to make sure that we catch any problems and get them corrected before anything major happens.  It's a job that keeps me away from my desk for much of the day, and I'm loving it.  The casthouses are awesome, but I'll have to get into those again some other day.

Until then, I must retire.  I get up earlier now and I have an incredible amount of things going on that I can't disclose currently.  Rest assured, though, that I have not forgotten this blog or the Readers of it.  Perchance once Stewartland is out of my hands things'll swing back closer to normalcy.  Here's to hoping.

And Just Like That...

...Vacation ends.  Well, if you want to call it a vacation.  Technically we didn't vacate our beloved and despised Stewartland for sandy beaches or wooded vales.  No, we stayed home and worked our butts off. As I mentioned in a blog post a few moons back, we're trying to get Stewartland on the market.  To achieve this amazing feat we must first deep clean and sponge bathe the house.  This goes hand in hand with one of our 2012 goals: to rid ourselves of material goods, and we spent the majority of the week cleaning and weeding and boxing and tossing.  It was a busy week, but we got a lot finished.

...I started my new job today.  Technically I didn't really do anything other than orientate myself with the Manuel's Mousepad Emporium (MME).  I'll continue to be orientated all week, going through safety and policy and whatnot.  But after going through my benefit package today, I'm extremely excited at how much God has blessed me.  My paycheck will be a little less than I have been making, but only slightly, and the benefits are so offsetting that it's negligible.

...I started exercising and getting healthy.  Technically I started a month ago.  I'd been feeling the faint stirrings in my ticker box to do so, but Carl's post on June 11--"(It was) Time for a Change"--gave me the final nudge into that not-so-gentle good morning.  (He also inspired a ton of others to shape up and live healthier, and those of us joined an email support group.  You should definitely read his post.)  Starting just a day or two later I began getting up an hour earlier than I normally did, right around 5:30am.  I started educating myself on eating healthier.  I took initiative.  I ran 2-3 miles every other day or so.  I've stopped with Doritos.  And since then I've definitely gotten* much healthier.  It's a wonderful feeling that I'll probably elaborate on sometime in the future.

...Blogging stalled.  Literally.  Rememorandom takes the back burner while life is in full throttle, and life is well into full throttle.  I very much enjoy blogging and the community, but there's just too danged much going on to have the time to do it all right now.  I'll continue to post intermittently until things calm down.  Winter is coming, after all.

-----
*this is one of my least favorite words in all of English.  But the Dude abides.