Candlemaking Attempt #2

I received my shipment from Bitter Creek today. Woo-hoo! Here's an inventory:

• "Shades of Brown" liquid dye, 2 oz bottle


•  Hazelnut Fragrance Oil (FO), 1 oz sampler


•  Rootbeer FO, 1 oz sampler


•  Patchouli FO, 1 oz sampler


•  Very Vanilla FO, 1 oz sampler


•  Cola FO, 1 oz sampler


•  Amaretto FO, 1 oz sampler

Add that to my Eggnog FO and French Vanilla color block from Brighter Scents, and I've got quite the beginning of a candle cornucopia. (Please note that I chose scents that could easily be tinted with a combination of the brown and the french vanilla.) I also ordered wick stickies (to anchor wicks to their containers), more wicks, and cranberry liquid dye from Brighter Scents, mainly because Bitter Creek didn't carry the stickies, and I had to round out my order to $10 to charge it. (Darn those small businesses! Just like Hatter...)

So, tonight I tried a second run of candle fun, and it seems to have worked out a little better this time. I guesstimated how much each of my containers could hold (this time, I used the mini sundae cups), and I doled out wax chips by weight instead of volume this time. The large glass measuring cup was quite helpful for melting and pouring wax, and the small measuring glass made much less guesswork of measuring FO amounts.

This time, I opted to use the Amaretto scent, and to add but a single drop of brown to the vanilla dye. I need to remember that the wax will cool lighter than the initial color when still melted—it started out the color of a really strong Amaretto Sour, and ended up the color of a really weak one. Ah, well. I wish I had a digital camera... I'd show you.

After having the whole apartment smell like Amaretto, I'm not sure this is a scent of candle I would normally burn... but we'll see. I still have to use my remaining half-ounce of Amaretto to mix with the Cola to make an Amaretto-and-Coke candle. :-)

I suppose you want to know more about how I'm liking my new job...?

This week so far, I've learned to do several things that I never even knew existed before. First, there's reports on suspected check kiting. Check kiting, according to Dr. Damn at totse.com, is "using the lag time between check cashing and clearing to generate illegal revenue." Like, when you have two accounts at two different banks, and write a check from one to deposit into the other, knowing full well that you don't have the money in the first account to cover the check, but also knowing that it'll take the bank two days to clear it, and in that time you can write a check from your other bank to deposit into the first bank to cover it. Follow?

I've also learned about Cash Letters. These are how the Federal Reserve Bank keeps track of where a check has been — the paper trail, as it were. If a check gets encoded for the wrong amount — say, you wrote your check for $10.00 but your account gets debited $100.00 instead — sometimes the bank needs to make a copy of the cash letter to send to the Fed to say, "Hey! You debited us a hundred bucks here! See? We want our ninety bucks back!"

So, what have I been doing with these things? Well, I highlight particular suspects on the report for check kiting, for one. I look at the previous day's report, and highlight those account numbers on the current day's report, to make Judy's job easier when she looks them up in the computer all day. I also go out into the garage and delve into long boxes to fetch Cash Reports to copy. They're printed on that old-school greenbar computer paper (you know, like in the basement of Hayes Hall on-campus?). To figure out what reports to find and where to find them, I have to look online in a couple different databases and jump through some hoops. Overall, it's relatively simple work, but necessary. My doing it frees up the other workers to do the things I don't have access to do... like... well, come to think of it, I'm not sure what they do all day, but I'm sure it's important.

As for my job... it seems that my job for now is to fill in for two other departments being short a person. I'm OK with that. I'm enjoying learning more about how the bank works, and the more I learn, the more marketable I become. Or something like that.

I also found out that the girl who had my position before me, who got a better job offer elsewhere and quit, left after three weeks in the position. So, I'm not going to feel bad if I happen to secure another job in the near future, since I'd be about on a par with her, time-wise. Of course, I haven't heard from the companies I had phone interviews with, so I'm not holding my breath. Although maybe I should check Sunday's paper for more jobs, anyway.