the pyro strikes again

so i've already tried to burn down my house... this time i thought i'd try to burn down my school!
thankfully, i didn't succeed. it sure was a smoky mess though.

the high school art club has been learning the fine art of screenprinting this semester. perhaps if we had a less ghetto 'dark room' we could have remained incident-free...

it's actually just my supplies closet. there's no dark room about it, except for the lack of windows. oh, and it's a room.
part of the screenprinting process is to expose the light-sensitive screen to a flood light (300 watts to be exact) for 30 minutes or so. to accomplish that step in the process, i had the light clamp jerry-rigged over the wooden frame. about half way through the 30 minutes, the clamp failed to do its clamping duty and the lightbulb just happened to fall over onto the screen unbeknownst to me... luckily one of my students went into the closet around that time looking for something.
she said, 'ms. corley is it supposed to be so smoky in there?!'

that's the point where i almost had a cow.

here's the resulting melted floor tile. could have been much worse -- the wooden shelves were full of paper. i don't think the wooden-&-cloth screen the lightbulb had fallen onto ever burst into outright flames, but it was getting very close to that. we just ended up with a lot of smoke.

my hair smelled like a campfire. i've been spraying air freshener all day long.

moral of this story (and every story including fire):
life is dangerous.
be prepared!