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There are times when we question our own sanity and believe you me the times I have questioned my own have come up many a time. However, in times like these when the economy is on the brink of something (ruin or reignition?), my mother is hooked up to machinery that is helping her to “live”, I’m running an ad for adoption that appears just above grave sites for sale, and a family member has arrived on the scene to, as one ex put it, “make everyone’s life miserable” – I had to laugh when a friend said she’d buy my sibling a wicker table if she would only just shut up.

So I got to thinking about how it is that in this world, when you want to adopt a dog, you go to the SPCA and get one. No one asks you to take a lunacy test, to see if maybe you would abuse this animal. And if you want to foster a child who has been through abusive situations enough already, fine, the state will pay you to house the child not first determining if you are not a child yourself. And so when a colleague was commenting on how before the Olympics come to Rio, he’s sure the police will enter the 300 favelas and provide instant change-o clean sweeps of anyone that remotely smacks of ugly and I said, send me a few of those children before that happens.

But then I saw there was a lunacy test online – how perfect – and so I am sending it out there to all of you who need to know. Naturally, the real lunatics won’t take this test. My test results put me closely in line with:

You are Charles VI of France, also known as Charles the Mad or Charles the Well-Beloved!

Today in step class as I did knee lifts and then arabesques and revolutions, and listen to the instructor yell WOO, I thought that I might be in some sort of experiment bubble where aliens have given us more food than we should eat and then threw in some wine and now fat, we get on the hamster wheel and churn churn churn it out. Are they laughing at us?

I wonder if god was one of us whether god’s life would be a series of routines like walking the dog, drinking tea, going to work, exercising, eating, taking a shower, and bed.

We were invited to friends last night for dinner – we usually loathe to leave the house on Sunday but had been turning down invitations for too long. We had a wonderful dinner of salad with lemony vinaigrette, homemade pasta of ham and mushroom lasagna, and afterwards a chocolate bomb souffle, not to mention good conversation. Sometimes it is worth leaving the house.

1) start doing yoga

2) take Nutramax Cosamin ASU and Omega 3 for joint lubrication and antiinflammatory properties, aside from the other benefits

3) skin care – find a good daily moisturizer like Olay with SPF 15 and then invest in a nightly one like Barbor.

4) get plenty of sleep

5) drink water

6) take a good multivitamin

7) eat healthy

T is an academic – they live outside the normal workaday world in their tempo. She reclines to read most of the time. I’ll be jetting through the house going from here to there almost at Loca speed and she’ll say come sit here with me or lay down here by me and I’ll just look at her as if she landed from Mars.

Similarly, my mother was always telling me to sit a spell, to lie down with her and watch TV and I’d be spinning around in circles and hopping from foot to foot moving onto the next thing. Now that she is the hospital there is an urgency that underscores her request. Come lie down, she says, and pats the side of the bed with her hands in restraints. And I lay down, and we watch TV together.

How do you stop the sun from shining, or slow down a moving train?

William Faulkner said he titled his novel Light in August after sitting on his back porch with a glass of bourbon and seeing the summer light shine through the nut colored alcohol. I say that very light he saw is actually October’s light because of its softness. This morning, the Museum in the park was ringed by an autumn glow caused by the rising sun and it was reflected into the glassy lagoon like a fall postcard.

Light in October – lovely.

A friend was saying she always wants to tell her dad to “man up” and last night we were speaking about a woman friend of ours who is always whining about how she is not getting ahead because no one likes her and I decided she needs to “girl up” and get a life.

We were in the car with friends on Saturday and passed a bride in full regalia getting into a car and our friend said, “Isn’t it lucky to see a bride?” And we said, hey why not? Today, I was walking Loca through City  Park and we came upon the tree that sits in the middle of the lagoon without any leaves – there are actually two, each on a little island. One is where the cormorants dry their wings and the other is where – now – the pelicans hang out. Today there were four pelicans sitting majestically if not goofily in the tree. Four is my lucky number. Seeing four pelicans surely must mean this is my lucky day – no?

Today, just about noon, T and I poured an ice cold beer and went outside on the front porch. The weather was perfect. The bayou was glistening in the sun. The very air seemed to sing Sunday in all of its relaxed, unstressed, calmness. And we toasted to our wonderful life and the love that surrounds us and whispered our wish that a baby join us on that porch very soon.