dianaschnuth

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.

Well, I’m certainly feeling artsy-craftsy. Yesterday, I thrifted some candle containers: two small sundae cups, two miniature mason jar drinking glasses (aka salt & pepper shakers), and a dark brown airtight container of some sort, maybe a sugar jar. Plus, I got a glass measuring cup with a spout for melting and pouring wax. Last night I ordered some sticky glue tabs (for anchoring wicks down while pouring wax), more wicks, half a dozen fragrance samples, and two more colors of dye. Today, I bought two more potential candle containers at Goodwill.

I also repotted a bunch of my plants today — I broke apart the remnants of the "dish garden" I got at Memaw’s funeral, since most of it was dead from lack of light and water. (Hey, I couldn’t find a good place to put it where it would get plenty of light and where I’d remember to water it.) So, I salvaged two plants from that. While I was at it, I potted the Christmas cactus that’s been living in a vase full of water for the past two years. Then I thought I was done, and started to rearrange pots and saucers on my one well-lighted shelf o’ plants… and discovered that my spider plant had roots growing out of its watering hole in the bottom of the pot. So, back outside to repot the spider in my only remaining sizable pot, which is a good full foot in diameter. It should have plenty of room to stretch out now.

So, I’m feeling quite wifely and domesticated today, despite the fact that I still have junk sitting on the floor of our computer room, waiting to be cleaned.

I got my Beginner’s Soy Candle Making Kit via UPS today. This, along with my recent rediscovery of baking chocolate in the cupboard, drove me to be experimental tonight.

Experiment #1: Quick and Easy Fudgey (Low-Carb) Brownies
I had previously looked at the recipe in the Hershey’s box and discovered that the only bad things in the brownie recipe were flour and sugar. So, this weekend, we purchased some almond flour and a pourable box of Splenda to take care of those naughty ingredients. Tonight, I took the plunge and baked the brownies, with the intention of bringing them to work tomorrow for a goodbye-to-Lockbox-early snack.

Experiment #1 Result: Marginal Success
Maybe I halved the recipe wrong. Maybe the almond flour was a poor idea. At any rate, the brownies were not fudgey, neither were they fluffy. In fact, they were rather dry, though moderately cakey. I’m not going to take them to work. At six carbs a brownie, though, they’re not a complete failure. Maybe they’d work well with some vanilla Atkins ice cream…

Experiment #2: Soy Candles
In my candlemaking kit was two pounds of soy wax, several ounces of fragrance, a small brick of dye, six wicks with metal clips/stands, and three warning labels. Oh, yes, and instructions, which I carefully followed. I melted about 16 oz of wax in a glass container in the microwave, then added some dye, then added (oops) twice as much fragrance as I should have. Ah, well. So far, so good. I attempted to stand the wicks in the containers I’d chosen (purchased from Goodwill this weekend), and finally glued them in place as suggested. Note to self: next time, either melt the wax in a container with a spout, or locate an appropriate funnel through which to pour the wax. It’s a good thing I put newspaper under the containers, otherwise I would have "waxed" our kitchen table. The wicks, of course, immediately heated and wilted off to the side; I had to wait until the wax cooled a little to ever-so-carefully balance and center them.

Experiment #2: Moderate Success
As mentioned, the wax got everywhere during the pouring process, which makes for a very unpretty container. The two candles are of different sizes, too, due to me freaking out about getting wax everywhere and not concentrating more on getting equal amounts of wax in each candle. And don’t forget that I added waaay too much eggnog fragrance. I actually guessed well about the amount of dye to melt in, though — but even so, they could have been just a little lighter.

Overall, I intend to try both of these experiments again, being better prepared and working on improving my techniques. I didn’t expect both of these to be stellar on the first try (certainly not the candles, though I had higher hopes for the brownies). I’ve already taste-tested the brownies; I think I’m going to go see if the candles have finished setting, and do a test burn. Mmm… eggnog.

Update: midnight
I don’t think I added an excessive amount of fragrance to my candle. In fact, I could have added more. I’m also a little unsure of the containers I chose — I think they’re a little wide for the burn pool. (That’s the area of melted wax.) Overall, though, still a successful experiment.