The last of my spring semester grades are due by noon today, and as usual I’m working down to the wire. No matter how organized and pro-active I am, each semester it seems to take forever to complete the last bit of grading, as if the final push is more demanding than any that came before it.

The photo above illustrates another kind of final push. Lacking a car, how would you cart a couple boxes of wine from a liquor store in Somerville, Massachusetts? Perhaps a wheeled office chair (the latest in my fascination with feral furniture) would serve nicely as a makeshift shopping cart…or not. The fact that this chair was abandoned right around the corner of that Somerville liquor store, plus the fact that the boxes, minus their contents, had been left behind, suggests that the final push is indeed the hardest.

Of course, you could simply steal, er, borrow a shopping cart to get your goods home, as I suspect happened with this errant CVS cart, which I spotted in Newton, Massachusetts last month. You don’t suppose it rolled itself here, do you?