A Day in The Life of Jace Timmer

10 août 2020 11:17 Published by Jace Timmer 4 commentaires

Hey readers,

Thank you all again for coming back to my blogging journey. I hope you are all enjoying them as much as I am enjoying making these for all of you. This blog is my second last blog. I was having a hard time thinking of another interesting but not repetitive topic to write this blog on. I began brainstorming, and realized when I think about a blogger, I picture someone writing down their every move. This led me to the conclusion that my life is interesting (in my opinion), so I thought I would take you through a day in the life of Jace Timmer (me). I sure keep myself busy, that’s for sure. Enjoy!

July 28th, 2020

5:35 – Wake Up

I start my day by waking up and doing my morning routine. I get dressed, brushed my teeth, pack my lunch for the day from the past meal’s leftovers. I do not eat breakfast in the morning because I am on an intermittent fasting diet (lean gains protocol). This fast allows me to eat for 8 hours in the day and fast for the remaining 16 hours. I like to start eating at about 12:00 – 12:30ish and have my last meal at around 8:00 – 8:30ish. 

Figure 1: A picture of myself standing in front of Jeannette Lake before I make my morning commute to work.

5:50 – Leave Lake

I’m currently living at Jeannette Lake in the Meadow Lake Provincial Park. I do not always live up at the lake, but when we get those 30° ͨ weeks when I’m working, I’ll move up so I can enjoy my evenings in the heat with my family and friends. My commuter car is a 2013 Honda Civic Touring model. If I drive in a fuel-efficient manner, I find I can get around 40 MPG.

Figure 2: The morning dew rolling off my car before I leave.

6:50 – Arrive at Work

I start work at 7:00 am, but I like to aim to be at work a bit early just in case there is lots of wildlife, roads are bad, etc. I sign into the iPad at the front desk and get settled into my office for the day.

7:05 – Daily Check-Ins 

Because of Covid-19, my supervisor Candace does most of her work from home. Every morning at 7:05 sharp, we have our daily check-ins where we go over our board of work that we have planned to complete. Candace and I created and maintained this board to help us accomplish more in a day. It allows us to have a visual on what we need to achieve in the day and helps us keep track of what we need to do. We always start these meetings off with a riddle or joke to keep them exciting and funny in the morning. These meetings are nice for me because it is usually the most communication I get to have in a day. This lack of communication is due to the office capacity being limited to only 30% capacity due to the current global pandemic.

Figure 3: The board in which we plan our days’ work on.

7:35 – Check Emails

After the morning meeting, I know what I am supposed to do for the day and am ready to execute these tasks provided. Before I start these tasks, I do some sifting through any missed emails when I was away or ones I never got to. Usually, there are not too many of these on any given Tuesday. Most of my missed emails are from Friday because I work four 10.5-hour shifts per week, which allows me not to work on Fridays.

Figure 4: Jace Timmer (me) checking my emails for the day.

8:00 – 5S Audits

On this day, I was working on 5S audits. As stated in my last blog. 5S is a lean tool used to clean and organized an area to optimize its efficiency. The final « S » in 5S stands for sustain. We do audits on these areas throughout the OSB mill to ensure they are being sustained properly. Right now, we only have 6 Auditors for these 5S locations, so each month, we are all trying to train one other person to even the load amongst more people.

8:30 – AME Work

AME’s are authorizations for major expenditures. I do these when the mill has a project costing over $25,000 and is not in the budget. I take the work order and talk about the summary of the work, different costs (labour, parts, scaffolding, etc.), the benefits that this work will bring to the mill if it is an expense or capital. I then fill out verbiage explaining and summarizing the need for this money so that we can have the funds approved. I make the AME verbiage and fill out a form that’s ready to be signed by anywhere from the financial manager up to the president and CEO of Tolko, depending on the cost of the project. I like to think of this as being a money detective and then translating it onto paper by talking to the subject matter expert.

12:00 – Lunch

I sadly did not get a picture for lunch because I was so hungry, I forgot to snap a photo of it before I ate it all up. At Tolko, I get a 30-minute unpaid lunch. On this particular day, I had a big bowl of chili that my magnificent mother and auntie made, a banana and a garden grown cucumber. I ate all of this virtually with another co-worker because I am supposed to eat in my office to save lunchroom space for others. 

12:30 – More Audit-Related Work

Some areas in which these audits need to take place are in or passed areas that required a half-mask or full-face mask because of the MDI and/or formaldehyde in the air.

Figure 5: Jace Timmer wearing a full-face mask to do an audit near dangerous gasses.

1:30 – More AME Work

I completed an AME for the prentice base, which needs to be replaced due to its structural integrity, seeing it is suspended above the water.

3:30 – Small Lean Jobs Around the Mill

• Updating 5S boards
• Updating labels
• Taping out rooms for Covid-19 regulations sent by Tolko
• Etc.

5:30 – Leave Work to Go Home

6:30 – Arrive at Lake /Eat supper

As soon as I arrived home to the lake, I was greeted by the aroma of a Co-op brand big slab pizza on the oven. I know I am an athlete and that I should be eating only the healthiest of meals, but I was so tired of work and excited to enjoy the rest of the warm day outside that I decided to indulge in the pizza that was very tasty. After eating this pizza, I yet again realized that I forgot to take a photo of the food for this blog. I concluded that as soon as I smell food or get hungry, my mind turns off, and all I can think about is eating. 

6:50 – Go for a Jet Ski/Swim

Whenever I am in the mill, the wood room’s scent mixed in with the wax and resin of the OSB leaves my body smelling of a weird type of smell that I didn’t mind at first, but now don’t want to be smelling this way when I’m at home. Seeing the day was beautiful, and I needed to wash up. My family and I went out with the boat and Jet Ski for a swim in the bay. On our way home from this swim, we stopped by the barge with a 13-foot diving board and slide.

Figure 6: Jace Timmer riding a stand-up jet ski

Figure 7: Jace Timmer jumping off of a barge diving board.

8:00 – Workout for 2 hours

A vital part of being a college athlete is training. Our team trainer has us doing a minimum of four resistance training lifts a week with the option of 5 if we are feeling productive. The gym in my hometown has many rules and regulations that make lifting not as easy. Luckily for me, since I’ve gotten home for university, I have borrowed weights from my alma mater. This allows me to work out right at home, which has been fantastic for me.

Figure 8: Jace Timmer doing his volleyball workouts.

10:00 – Swim/Cardio

After my long workout, I still had quite a bit of energy, so I decided to swim to the barge, which is only 600 meters away, then swim to shore and jog on the beach back. I was tired when I finished this little cardio workout.

Figure 10: Jace Timmer jumping off the dock before his swim.

Figure 11: The mapped-out path of the cardio swim and run

11:00 – Sleep

I do my before-bed routine and hit the hay. I am usually drained by this point and fall asleep very quickly.

I enjoy many other activities such as flying my drone, wake surfing, quading and playing sports (beach volleyball, pickleball, ping pong, spike ball), but God only put 24 hours in a day, so I try and get as much as I can done in that amount of time. Below are some pictures of these other activities that I also do from time to time:

Figure 12: A drone photo of Jeannette Lake (close) and Flotten Lake

Figure 13: Wake surfing with my neighbour.

I am blessed to grow up in a beautiful free country like Canada where I have a great job in an exciting industry that allows me to live life to the fullest. God has blessed me with living near beautiful lakes and forests with amazing family and friends.

Till next time,

Jace Timmer.