not quite serendipity

Walking up the street yesterday afternoon, on my way to collect the office mail from the group mailbox, I was distracted from my blue-sky-and-fluffy-cloud-gazing by a sheaf of papers, fluttering in the gutter. Not your usual bit of junk mail litter, this was blue-lined homework paper, covered with neat, cursive script. I stopped to read from a brief, bulleted list:

Reasons why you might not hand in a completed assignment:

• your computer crashed and you forgot to save what you had written


• your brother fell off his bike and you had to take him to the walk-in


• your mom was late picking you up from soccer practice

Sadly, the writer forgot to include the point that would prove, without a doubt, that good reasons do exist for failure to complete: "My notes are lying in the gutter on Anderson Ave!"

Still in the not quite serendipity department, we're enduring a major construction project on the lot next to our office building. I say 'enduring' because it sometimes feels as if the noise and disruption and dust will never end. The dust, especially, is driving us all to distraction. It coats the windows, creeps in through the tiniest cracks and leaves our desktops feeling gritty. Our cars, parked between our office and the construction site, look like rolling sandboxes. Ugh. The serendipity? They're building a carwash.