I am a klutz.

Yesterday I had to run a number of errands, among them buying a new blender for my roommate, whose blender pitcher I shattered by dropping it on the floor. I returned successfully with a new blender, which hadn't cost too much. Mission accomplished.

I then decided to make a small lunch to tide me over until my evening run. I settled on soft-boiled eggs and toast. I popped my toast into the toaster oven, set the dial, and returned to my computer to keep working till it was done.

Now, I am convinced our toaster oven is haunted by gremlins. It used to be that setting it to five minutes resulted in toast that was slightly done on one side, still cold on the other. Recently, it has been slightly burning toast around the edges when set to that time. However, I set the timer to five minutes.

A few minutes later, I began to smell burning. I returned to the kitchen to check on my toast. What I saw was appalling.

The toaster oven had turned into a mini-fireplace. A large and bright orange flame was slowly feeding off one piece of toast, which had turned into a black cinder. Black smoke was curling out of the cracks of the toaster oven.

I quickly a) grabbed a glass with some water; b) carefully unplugged the toaster; c) gingerly opened the door (which resulted in the flame getting bigger); and d) splashed water on the black cinder. It sizzled, and thankfully, completely extinguished the flame.

The toaster oven had scorch marks all along the inside. I hoped it was unharmed. However, I got up this morning (well, this afternoon really) to find the toaster oven sitting on the floor and an email from my roommate saying that it was dead. She'd tried it and the top element started smoking. Not a good sign.

So now I have to buy a new toaster oven. Perhaps I'll go back to the same place where yesterday I bought the blender.

Finally, I went for my run. I was about a mile from home on my 5-mile loop when my eyes briefly registered an irregular patch on the sidewalk. A millisecond later, my toe registered it; and a millisecond after that, I was lying sprawled and stunned on the cold sidewalk with a great shooting pain in my elbow, which had absorbed the force of the fall.

A man was coming along the sidewalk, so I pulled myself up to a sitting position to try to regain some semblance of dignity. He stopped. "Are you OK?" I looked up into a concerned face surrounded by the hood of a black down jacket.

"I think so," I said. "My elbow hurts, but I think it'll be ok. I'm just going to stay here for a minute."

"Do you want a hand up?"

"That might be a good idea." And he extended a hand and helped me up, then walked off with several admonitions to "take it slowly" and profuse thanks from me.

I walked around for a minute, then started slowly jogging home. The elbow pain had mostly subsided. When I got home I found it was bruised and scraped, but otherwise ok. And thanks to some application of arnica cream, today it doesn't even hurt very much.

Oi. Sometimes I wonder how I make it through life.