As kids on 5th grade or so we were going through a phase in which burning things was really cool. We found this abandoned house that had a shack with incecticide spray cans and an array of other flammable liquids in it (for whatever reason, the cans weren't anywhere near as old as the place). There was also an old metal barrel.

Well we did the reasonable thing of putting a fire in the barrel and throwing cans there. Some resulted in pretty cool fire effects, but some seemed to be duds.

Two friends went to look in the barrel and...BLAM!, a pillar of fire emerged. No serious injuries, but bunch of burned eyebrows and hair. This was when I though "Their moms are going to kill them. Hehe"

Naturally, I brought some of the stuff home.

We had this shed with a flat roof we liked so spend time on and got another brilliant idea: Let's get a roll of toilet paper, soak it in whatever flammable stuff we had and see how it burns. On the roof.

I still don't know how this actually happens, but after a bit of burning the roll made a weird "swoosh" sound and it appeared the center part rose up a bit. Then it happened again and briefly after... BOOM! Flaming pieces of paper everywhere, I fall back, off the shed roof and through a tree with sharp branches that cut my neck and face. I'm bleeding (tiny bit) and running inside the house and this time thinking "My mom is going to kill me". Luckily my friend stayed on the roof an stomped out the burning bits.

Within a week or so, I had a friend over and my mom was away. We had bunch of candles on the kitchen table that had melted on the table and had yet another a genius idea to play with fire - let's burn these and make a big candle in a cup!

It was bad weather outside, so naturally we chose to do this on top of the fireplace (pretty large flat surface that wouldn't burn). We made a really cool setup where we had a candle burning on top of this metal candle leg and a cup under it. We held other candles on the flame so they'd melt and drip to the cup.

This was slow and we were busy with our summer vacation, so we decided to rush it by raiding the cabinet with candles and adding bunch of additional candles burning around in a contraption that was a real feat of engineering, held together by whatever tools we could find.

The speed of melting was impressive, but there was a problem - the flames started growing bigger and the melted candle wax started burning. Because the roof wasn't that far off, we decided this isn't very safe anymore and tried to blow the flames out with very little success.

So I went to get a big pint of water to throw at it to put out the flames and shortly afterwards I learned why you should not throw water on burning candle wax, as it was my time to lose some hair and eyebrows.

After brief panic we got a fire blanket and put the flames out. At this point I realize the white roof above the fireplace now had a pretty big black area on it. This was the last occasion where I was pretty sure my mom is going to kill me for playing with fire and the phase came to an end.

Unfortunately it didn't stop us from being the kind of troublemakers you wouldn't wish on your mortal enemy for at least two more years. Just not with fire.