Fun with Wicks and Blame

Confession.
My sister Cassidy has managed to blog for two weeks in a row. I have this need to match her blog posts so I don't fall into yet another abandoned project, that of regular blogging. However, my trip last week to Ohio precluded me from matching her post outright, so I'm hoping she'll be too busy to blog this week, making us even once more.
It should be mentioned that I'm postponing editing a chapter of fiction and writing an article for the Health Care Compact in Tennessee for this blog post, so it's either going to be really good or really bad. That being said, here is the second post in a long line of "Don't let your kids play with the Hodge girls."

Fun with Wicks and Blame

So, when I was about 14 we lived in a house named "Inferno", but not for reasons listed here. (Really, that fire was a totally unrelated event.) I don't know why me, my sister Lauren, and brother Aarel decided to make home made candles but when my mom came home, she told us to take it outside to the fire pit.

Turns out, electric stoves and hot wax don't mix with teenagers.

Neither do fire-pits and grease fires.

We rounded up as much wax as we could from old, banged-up house candles and put them in the pot. This fire got very hot, very quickly. In the name of safety we had a 5-gallon bucket of water standing by in case the fire got out of control... we were responsible pyromaniacs. The wax melted nicely and we started pouring the hot wax into the forms we had ready, these molds consisted of that cardboard thingie in the middle of toilet paper and paper towel rolls.

Made in the U.S.A

Lauren was pouring the wax, so me and Aarel went to the other side of the house to scour the forest for more firewood, leaving her with fireman Solon, our youngest brother.

According to Lauren, she slopped the wax pot while placing it back on the fire, causing the fire to climb into said pot. This caused Solon to take the 5-gallon bucket of water and throw it on the fire.

We didn't know that oil based fires burn hot enough to evaporate the water and cause a huge fireball.
We do now.

On the other side of the house I heard Lauren scream "Noooooooo", a large pop. Then I saw a huge fireball erupt. It must have been over 20 feet high because I was right next to the house and the plume of flame went higher. Running toward the explosion, I was thinking, "That's my sister over there!"

It really did look like this.

Bolting around the house I found Lauren and Solon on the ground, blown back about 5 feet. Solon was missing eyebrows, Lauren had singed hair and the fire was burning much higher than usual. We called abort mission and went in the house, hoping mom didn't see (or smell) the carnage. Later we learned that grease fires need dirt or some other smothering agent... Don't ask where we learned that from.

Our candles didn't look like this.