Living in Manhattan, as I did for years, means that Saturday morning errands entail a complicated set of calculations about how much, exactly, you can carry. Groceries, wine, large hardware items — all of these go into the mental adding machine (mine is more like an abacus) as you decide which combination of things you can lug home. If you’ve ever tried to figure out that famous riddle about the farmer who needs to cross the river with a fox, a goat, and a cabbage, you know what I mean.

There’s only so much you can carry without breaking something and only so many to-do’s you can do. If you buy that big ham, for instance, you really can’t stop and get your dry cleaning too. It’s either lightbulbs or the Samuel Smith Nut Brown Ale in the big bottles. And the eggs won’t make it home uncracked if you get that big thing of detergent. Saturdays in the city complex workflow problems.