the price of stupidity

If you would like to learn about how I managed to catch my hair on fire, read on.

I love to cook. I miss it when I don’t have time to spend in the kitchen. Since I have long hair I always make sure that my hair is tied back before I start cooking, because let’s face it, no one likes to find a long strand of hair in their food. Or a short one for that matter. Nasty. So I keep it in a ponytail. Never once did it occur to me that beyond causing sanitary problems, cooking with your hair down could also be a fire hazard.

I had been wanting to make this soup all week. I was given the recipe and told it was really yummy. I had all the stuff to make it, and finally, a night rolled around when I actually could. To make the soup you had to have a box of rice-a-roni, cooked as directed on the box, before you could make the soup. This takes a good half hour. So I pulled out the pot and started the rice. Since I wasn’t really cooking at this point, I forgot to pull my hair back.

I poured the rice into the pot, and thought I smelled some gas. We have a gas-stove top and one of the burners tends to go out while you are using it. I lowered my head to check under the pot to make sure the flame was still going. It was. When I stood back up I guess my hair fell forward RIGHT INTO THE FLAME.

The first sign that something was wrong was the horrible smell that suddenly filled the kitchen. Gag. I looked down at my hair and was extremely grateful to see that only the ends of a chunk of hair had been caught. Lucky for me, hair doesn’t seem to be too flammable. The hair that was burned looked like it had a bunch of little knots in it that were completely black. It was a pretty interesting sight. I tried to get a good picture; this was the best that I could come up with:

I spent the next half hour with a pair of scissors clipping the black ends of my hair off. The soup turned out fine, though not worth loosing your hair over. I learned my lesson, I shall never cook with my hair down again!