How I Nearly Burned Down My House

You may have heard of a hurricane around these here parts.  If you didn't hear about it, you may either a) have no connection to the outside world, in which case you're not reading this, or b) live in a foreign country.  However, my parents living in Vermont had to stream live coverage of the hurricane from an Australian station, so my guess is that option b is out.

Moving on.

The hurricane didn't cause anything too catastrophic around here, but it did cause me to lose power at my apartment for several hours.  Which leads me the point of this post: how I almost lit my house on fire.

I quickly realized that I was going to need some light if I wanted to stay up past 6:30 last night.  At first, I lit my candles and left them in the kitchen, but quickly decided that I'd rather hang out on my bed under my blankets (no heat!) rather than at my kitchen table.  I put two votive holders on my desk and window sill, and I put a glass jar candle on my dresser.

The lighting was lovely.  It almost made me wish the power went out every night because it felt cozy.  I read for awhile, talked to my mom, and watched the flame in the glass jar get progressively higher.  Suddenly (after a good hour of candle-burning), I realized that I had left some pajamas next to the candle, and as the flame got higher it was getting closer and closer to the flammable material.  

I approached the dresser.  I touched the side of the glass.  My finger burned!  I blew out the candle.  I grabbed the pajamas and tried to pick it up...but it had fused itself to the dresser.

Thought process: This is not my dresser.  I've ruined the dresser.  It's so hot.  I need a potholder.  ::grabs potholder::  Ah!  Hand is burning through the potholder!  Must put candle in non-flammable area!  Run to the sink!  Put water on super heated glass jar!

Had I thought this through, I would have decided that putting cold water on a very hot glass object was a bad idea, but I wasn't thinking about the jar so much as I was thinking about burning the house down.  Naturally, the jar cracked as soon as it touched the water.  Awesome.  Judging from the state of the jar though, I decided it didn't matter.

The dresser, however, still had a nice ring of melting resin.  I grabbed my now-wet kitchen sponge and put it on the spot...which immediately started steaming.  For your general knowledge - seeing a solid piece of wood steam is not a comforting thing when you know all emergency vehicles are occupied with the massive hurricane and widespread power outages.

There's really nothing after that, so sorry for the anti-climactic ending.  But just so that you know it really happened, here's the candle:

Happy Tuesday.