A string of culinary misfortunes

I'm pretty sure Obama is going to win. I know this because things have been going bad for me this week, and therefore must go better (Obama winning) next week.
Both misfortunes have at least been partially brought on by my own doing. The first deals with my kitchen stove. A few nights ago I decided to cook the turkey dumplings which Lori had given me a while ago. Don't worry, they were still excellent and had stayed frozen the whole time. However, I don't have a ton of meat pots or pans, so I used a shallow pan to boil water and cook the dumplings. In this process I spilled water onto the dials for adjusting the amount of gas. No biggy... well, later that night the gas wouldn't spark. Usually when you turn the dial, it sparks and you get fire, but no such luck. Miraculously the next day, the stove sparked again. However, last night I realized that one of the dials wouldn't turn. Apparently the spilled water had caused it to become sticky and hence it got stuck. I started cooking on the other burners anyway, and tried to clean the stuck dial. All this achieved was to short out the sparking mechanism again. In the process I turned the gas on with the stuck dial. What sucked was that the dial became stuck in the ON position, and gas started to rush out of the burner, without being lit. I immediately turned off the other flame and opened the window, plus turned on a fan. But still gas was pouring into the kitchen and I couldn't turn off the dial. Now, I like to think I am good at acting in tough positions. However, time and time again when confronted with a situation which requires decisive action, I take decisive, yet much more damaging action.
So, in this spirit, I decided to get my vice grips and, by removing the dial, try to manually turn the screw off (the dial was on a screw of sorts). I ran and got them, plus my cell phone to call my super. The vice grips turned out to be a horrible idea, since all I achieved was to crush the screw. Gas kept rushing.
Getting my super on the other line, I explained the situation and he gave me the advice I would have never thought of --- turn off the gas at the back of the stove. Problem solve. Well... I still need him to fix the stove, but no gas or massive fire risk.
Without a stove I had a new problem --- what to eat for dinner. I had been boiling water for pasta, and had already opened two cans of chickpeas, and chopped some garlic and pepper. So I just threw it all into the hot water, added a bunch of chopped cabbage, and heated in the microwave some soup mix to add to the pot. Not a bad soup for having been made only using the residual heat of boiling water. Oh.. I also crumbled some romano cheese into it.
Ok. second misfortune was this morning. I decided to get a bagel with lox cream cheese from a deli on the way to school. The cream cheese was horribly rancid (I still ate the bagel). I did what I think was my duty and called 311 to report a health code violate. As it turns out, I didn't even need to get a bagel, because I totally forgot that courant gets bagels every wednesday for the grad students. Stupid stupid stupid.
Anyway, in my opinion there is nothing worse than expecting the wonderful salty, oiling, creamy goodness of a bagel and lox, but instead getting bad cream cheese- YUCK.