Post #15-My Google Profile Picture

My profile picture may seem odd to others. Other profile pictures I've observed have been actual pictures of their respective owners, cartoon characters, or default dark blue guy against a light blue background. My profile picture is the flame from a burning pop bottle cap full of hand sanitizer.
Why would I ignite a bottle cap full of hand sanitizer? My original intention was to catalyze the oxidation of hand sanitizer to aldehydes via my newly acquired platinum wire I got for my element collection. It was a warm August day in 2013, and I was reading about an experiment in John Emsley's book Nature's Building Blocks that entailed holding a platinum wire in methanol and watching the wire glow red as the methanol was oxidized to formaldehyde. I wanted to see a glowing hot wire, and so with nothing else better to do I filled a pop bottle cap full of hand sanitizer and brought it outside and stuck the platinum wire inside.
Expecting gas bubbles, heat, and steam to emanate off of the hand sanitizer, I was very disappointed to find that nothing happened when I stuck the platinum wire inside. I felt a little let down when Eureka! I realized that hand sanitizer was composed of ethyl alcohol, which is flammable. I realized that I could redeem my failed experiment by igniting the hand sanitizer and watching it burn.
I borrowed a stove lighter from my garage, brought the bottle cap full of hand sanitizer outside, and ignited it. The flame burned cold and almost invisible at first. I wanted to get a good picture of it, so I carried this little lamp into the garage and closed the door and took the picture that is now my profile picture. After a few minutes of burning, I realized that the hot alcohol flame was melting the cap plastic and that the burning hand sanitizer would escape the confines of the cap. I ran into the kitchen, got a glass of water, and doused the hot flame. The water sizzled as the flame was quenched. The plastic bottle cap, once a rigid, moderately hard translucent cap, was now an opaque rubbery useless blob.
I asked my parents if I could repeat the experiment, but they said no. Later that afternoon as they were leaving for some activity, I asked again if I could do the experiment. They said, "Definitely not."
I have always been intrigued by fire. When I was nine years old my family went out and had a campfire in our filled-in swimming pool. When I was twelve, I went with my deacon's quorum to camp out by Utah Lake by a small tumble-down playhouse called "The Wikieup". After we built the campfire over an ant hill, my scout leader threw an old lighter into the campfire. We waited with awe until fwoosh!, the lighter released a small mushroom cloud of fire. With the backdrop of a previously torched car, we scavenged around for wood, couch cushions, and christmas lights to add to the fire. The christmas lights had a hard time burning. The next morning, after this same scout leader was done cooking pancakes, he set the plastic bull with pancake batter at the bottom on top of the fire. We watched as the pancake cooked in the bottom of melting plastic bowl. We finally got to put a couch cushion on the fire, and we watched it slowly melt away. After a campout that summer, I gained a reputation in the Vineyard First Ward of a "pyro".