Yesterday I came home from work craving, of all things, pumpkin. Luckily, I had a can of pumpkin donated to me by the much beloved Mike and Gulnara, so I mixed pumpkin and condensed milk and spices until I had something a lot like pumpkin pie filling, and put it in the oven to bake. I didn’t bother with crust – I wasn't craving crust, just pumpkin.

Pumpkin pie filling is fun to make, because the plain pumpkin from the can is pretty unappealing. Then you add condensed milk and it’s nice, but boring. Two shakes of various spices, though, and it’s wow, pumpkin pie.

This sounds like a boring story, doesn’t it? Girl comes home, makes pumpkin pie filling for dinner. Eats some yogurt while it’s baking. Weird, but boring.

Here comes the fun part: I looked through the window, determined that my pumpkin was ready, opened the door to take out the pumpkin and the oven window exploded into a million pieces. Glass hit me in the legs and splashed out all over the kitchen floor, skittering into the far corners of the room. Luckily, it seems that oven doors are made out of safety glass, because it shattered into little cubes like from a car accident and I wasn't cut or anything.

So I called my office manager and told her to get the landlady over to the house RIGHT NOW. Then I called Mike and Gulnara, and asked them to come over for moral support and translation. Everyone came over, there was much discussion about causality – the landlady tried to tell me I had done something wrong – and it was agreed that she’d bring someone to repair it the next day.

End of story, except that now I’m terrified of the oven and I will probably never bake anything ever again.

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USAID is one of many donors for the project I work for. The views expressed herein are the author’s own views and do not necessarily reflect those of the author’s employer or especially those of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government. And I mean it. I probably give the US government heart attacks.