I commit another faux pas

Last week, I went to the Wong Tai Sin temple complex in kowloon. It's a pretty big tourist draw (including groups wearing same-colored nametags led by young women holding flags), but I thought it would also be a good occasion to burn some incense to commemorate the death of my grandfather. So I bought a package of little sticks outside, and walk to what looked like an appropriate site, lit the bundle of them, and tried as faithfully as possible to copy what the other people around me were doing: bowing their heads forward, raising and lowering the burning incense, creating a cloud of fragrant smoke. I didn't do an amazing job, but I guess it's ok because I'm third-generation chinese-american (and so would not reasonably be expected to know what I was supposed to do), and the last time I spoke with my grandfather, he was happy for me that I was coming to work in Hong Kong, so I figure he won't be offended.

As you can see in the photo, there are little gas flames near offering sites. After bowing and presenting the incense, you take a few of the sticks and put them into a sand-filled box in front of the temple (or altar, or wherever). I was at this point in front of the temple in the photo, the name of which I didn't quite catch, but which seems to be "Three _____ Hall." I chose to believe the second word was "virtue" or something, since if I remember correctly there are three cardinal virtues in Confucianism (which supposedly parallels the three "honor" tiles in mahjong), so it seemed like a good place to be.

I figured that since eight is an auspicious number, I should put that many in at a time. Other people also put in groups of three, so I did that in a few places too. At this point, I was walking around with a rather large bundle of smoking incense sticks, but it didn't seem quite right to just kind of stick them all in one place. I walked to the main temple, which was nearby, and offered some more of the bundle there, but I was still left with kind of a lot of incense.
This was when I realized that some of the sticks in the middle hadn't really caught when I first lit everything, and were not sticking out of the middle, whole and unburnt. I went over to another gas flame, to try to relight them. In my limited experience with incense, you seem to need to get a decent flame going, and then extinguish it by waving it around a little bit, or the incense won't catch at all. So I tried to really get the stubborn middle sticks to light, and caused a little bit of a conflagration. I took them out of the glass box around the flame, and was trying to get them to die down, but shaking them only made the flames more intense (because, as we all know, adding oxygen to fire only encourages it).
Needless to say, a temple complex security guard immediately came running over to me, and yelled something angry-sounding in Cantonese, pointing at the nice-smelling torch burning in my hands. I saw a bucket of water next to a nearby trash can (which is used to put out all of the offered incense when it is periodically collected from the sand-filled boxes and thrown away by the staff), and gestured to it. The security guard nodded sternly. I half-lowered, half-dropped the flaming bundle into the water, and then threw it away myself. I tried to discreetly make my exit, although I don't know how the other worshipers and tourists could possibly have missed the sight of the tall foreign guy lighting his incense on fire and then being disciplined by a security guard.

I figure, at least I tried, and at least I managed to offer up about half the package before sending the whole enterprise up in flames. I'd like to think that as his second daughter's son, my grandfather wasn't hoping for too much more than that in the way of filial piety.