The genius who devised the plant-based diet I’ve been on since April (and he’s a double genius just for selling me on the idea) would be happy with how faithfully I’ve followed it for seven months. Mostly happy. I haven’t cheated in any way on the basic principles of meat, eggs or dairy. Once I accidentally ate part of a cracker before reading the label, but I unloaded the rest of those crackers before taking another bite.

There are a few areas where I haven’t been quite as diligent as I should have been. I’m supposed to calculate sodium percentages before buying anything, but I haven’t yet talked myself into doing math in the grocery aisle. It’s not just the percentage on the label that makes the difference in whether a food is allowed or not, but I use that percentage anyway.

You can see how little I consider the actual maximum sodium allowance from the fact that I don’t even know what the percentage is supposed to be, or how to figure it. But I do tend strongly toward low sodium foods, so I’m barely outside tolerable levels. Probably. That’d be my guess, anyway.

The other area where I fudge a little is oil. If any kind of oil is the first ingredient listed, I should leave that item on the shelf. And I do, most of the time, unless it’s something I really, really need. I failed miserably at trying to make my own salad dressing, so I occasionally use a balsamic vinaigrette that’s natural, but oily. Most of the dressings I use, though, have things like roasted peppers or papaya puree as the first ingredient. I’m not fooling myself that they don’t have oil in them, but then I don’t drown the salad in them, either.

With the days dwindling down and the long winter looming, it seemed such a waste to spend my whole Sunday inside, watching football and Nascar. So I didn’t. I didn’t leave home, of course, because being in the car would have been a waste. A waste of time, and a misuse of fossil fuel, when I have the green expanse of my own countryside just beyond the front door.

When the skinny black and white cat wandered through the yard, I left it alone. So did the birds, which is why I didn’t bother to chase the cat away. I want it to feel welcome to keep the rodent population under control, but not comfortable enough to go after my birds. I’m very protective of my birds. I fill the birdbath every day, and they appreciate it. They tell me the only way they can, by making lavish use of the facility.

It’s not as if I had a lot of free time, either to lounge in front of the TV or wander the acreage. Real life didn’t stop while I was preoccupied for the last two weeks, prepping for the audit. It’s too bad it didn’t, because I wouldn’t have fallen so far behind that a few bills didn’t get paid on time. I spent part of today making sure that doesn’t happen again (as much it’s possible to forestall my own neglect, indolence or prodigious inability to stay focused).

As difficult as the last two weeks have been — and they have been so difficult as to cause me to question just about everything I’ve spent the last twenty years doing — I’ve somehow managed to find time to read. That’s maybe the answer to the question. I work so I have food to eat, a roof overhead, and time to read novels like Labor Day, by Joyce Maynard.

You know me. I’m not going to spend a lot of time dragging you through the narrative. It’s almost (but not quite) as bad as telling you what I dreamed last night (and you can be thankful that I never remember my dreams). It’s just about on a par with someone telling me the entire plot of a movie they’ve just seen, or what happened on a television show I don’t watch. (Oops. A little guilty of that myself, but on the other hand, nobody has to follow me on Twitter if they don’t want to.)

What I will say is that this book has some things I like. It has fragile people finding unconventional ways to cope, and it has people making unlikely connections with each other. It has a strong and engaging narrative voice. It has meditations on what it is we do to shape our world and how we affect the way others survive their own rocky journey.

Here’s what I think. There are people in this world who only need a chance. All they need is for someone to believe in them, or even just to get out of their way, and they will make things better for everyone around them. The problem is that we don’t always make the right decisions, either because we’re selfish or because we just don’t know any better. But the best part of us will always try. We’ll try to get it right the first time, and failing that, we’ll try to fix it the best we can. That’s about all we can expect from ourselves.

All of that isn’t specifically spelled out in the book. It’s just a story about people who are thrown together by circumstance, and how the merest chance can send lives spinning in directions they never anticipated. But mostly it’s just a story, and one worth reading (even if I didn’t really have time).