Battery Terminal Cleaning – The terminals on my car battery were the rainbow of verdigris and aerugo that comes from copper compounds oxidizing into at least three different states and while beautiful, probably didn’t help the functioning of my car.  I removed the terminals, scrubbed away the corrosion and found that there wasn’t enough terminal left to actually connect to the battery post.  Hazaa.  So I borrowed my dad’s car to get new terminals and go to Michael’s.

Candy Melts – Candy melts are bits of chocolate one melts down to use as coatings for fruits, confections, and other things that should be covered in chocolate.  They’re largely vegetable oil which was maybe passed over by a cocoa bean and the industry seems to be dominated by the lone firm of Wilton’s much like Arm & Hammer is the world’s only producer of baking soda.  Michael’s had candy melt but only in pastel colors.  Assuming color in candy melts are subtractive, I reasoned that adding together pastel green with pastel blue, with pastel red would make a very non-pastel black, I purchased these in equal parts.  Later, I found out they did make black, or eventually did, I lost track of my double boiler and the pot seized leaving me with a darkened cocoa brick.  I opted to just use morsels on the next batch of truffles to coat and avoided the color conundrum.

Frames – Michael’s once stocked SSFs “simple shitty frames” but seems to no longer.  I had a coupon for 50% off all frames in a purchase and simply wanted a piece of acrylic with black plastic around it.  I buy frames to protect and highlight the photo, not subdue it.  All that Michael’s had were terribly garish “FAMILY” and “LOVE” frames that were either almost Baroque in ornamentation or in odd (to me) dimensions.  I did find what I’d call “frames” but these went by the name of “acrylic photo display boxes” which, of course, was not included in my “frames” coupon.  I guess I go back to buying out Joanne’s Fabric’s stock next time they have a sale.

A day of failures, but a productive day in that I got them all out of the way before lunch.