This blog post took me way too long to write.

Was trying to think of a clever segue/entry to this story but screw it let's just go with a cold opening.

When I was in high school we had a totally awesome pot belly wet back fire place. For those of you who aren't familiar with fireplace design, it's a big black box that looks something like this:

It has a door on the front for loading wood and a little round hatch in that door to leave open if it's dying down a bit to let more oxygen in.

Once Dad showed my brothers and I how to load it properly,we were allowed to tend to the fire ourselves.
Dad made the mistake of keeping a fully loaded squirt bottle full of methylated spirits next to the fire and teaching us the equation; meths+fire=awesome! Which is true but potentially extremely dangerous to teach to your 16 year old daughter who is also a budding pyromaniac.

One night I was home alone as Dad and my brothers were away for a week at a school camp.
It's pouring down outside and pretty cold so I start loading the fire, soak everything in meths then light it and smile broadly at the satisfying "whoooosh!" sound.
After awhile the fire starts to die down a bit so I open up the door to put more wood in but get slightly distracted by the pretty dancing flames, I'm talking moth to a flame here.

I thought I should be kind to my friend the fire and give it a little extra help. By help I mean I had a little game of "Let's see how big a controlled burst I can get by strategically spraying meths on different parts of the fire".

You may have noticed by the above pic that I was wearing my lovely, snuggly, flannel dressing gown at the time. I should also mention how amazingly flammable flannel is. Back to the story.

Naturally the several sudden spurs (heh) of flames causes a few embers to escape from the safe confines of the fire box. This goes completely unnoticed by myself until one lands on the sleeve of my dressing gown.

This is where all hell breaks loose.

I notice my dressing gown has suddenly become extremely hot and developed the ability to glow, this is quite unusual for a dressing gown.
I look down to see my sleeve has become wonderfully adept at setting itself alight and my first instinct is "Cover the ember so it cuts off the oxygen and dies" unfortunately my choice of flame cover was poor in that I used my other hand to try and pat it out. My hand naturally gets quite painful because it is being burned by the ember so I remove it which then means there is no longer anything stopping oxygen getting to the ember and my dressing gown is even more on fire now.

The next few moments were a furious blur of the following thoughts:
"holy crap my arm is on fire!"
"Damn it my hand freaking hurts!"
"Oh shit how do I get to some water without setting everything else on fire as I run past?!"
"Shit! The fireplace door is open!"
"I'm still on fire!"

If someone had looked in the window at that point it may have looked something like this:

I don't remember how I eventually put it out, all I know is I had a wicked burn on my palm and was hella carefully around the meths from that point onwards.