Just in Time

For more than a year, friends have been asking me what I am going to do once I settle into our new home in Grass Valley. I’m nearly 69, retired, and still full of energy and ideas! However, my answer was always a bit vague: something about food … or dogs … or chickens. During the year of living in a construction zone in Berkeley and then the waiting months in Fish Camp, I was just being patient. I didn’t feel empty, just expectant. I was a little bored, but I could always entertain myself by thinking about, buying, and preparing meals. That’s the way it’s always been with me. However, once settled in, it was time to act!

When we’d been here for 2 weeks, I got an interesting email from an acquaintance. The subject was: “I've bent your ear about my nutrition reading, so now I'm giving you the references in writing.” This was a little surprising because she hadn’t bent my ear at all. In fact, I hadn’t heard from her in several years, although she was the person who started my daily routine of ground flax seeds!  I had heard about her though, and I think a mutual friend must have mentioned that I would be interested in her reading list. Boy, was I!

It came just in time. We were well on our way to being unpacked and I was definitely ready for the next interesting thing – I’d been calling for adventures for months! I had already scoped out the local coop where I could buy organic food and I had even ordered a quarter of pasture-raised beef for that empty freezer in the garage. Since I hadn’t investigated fostering dogs or raising chickens, it did look like my interest was leaning toward healthy food.

The first book on the list was Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan, MD. What an eye-opener! She writes about how we can influence our genes with nutrition! Even though I’ve been interested in nutrition and have a degree in biochemistry, I had never heard of such a thing. For years, I’ve been working under the assumption that if my parents had Type 2 Diabetes (thanks Mom and Grandma) and coronary artery disease (thanks Dad), I would just have to be careful that I didn’t go down the same paths they did. Still, it was very likely I would, just later than they did. I didn’t think I could actually change the possibilities. Here came an MD who espoused the same things I have been saying for years.

Over the past few months, I think Jim and I were eating our way to calmness. There were some really stressful days, weeks, months. But finally we had arrived at our new digs. The house is better than I imagined I’d ever have. We are more-or-less debt free! The weather is glorious (but much too dry for the farmers and ranchers). And we both were starting to tip the scales at our all-time highs. All that nibbling things that weren’t good for us – “just this once” happened a thousand times!

What to do? Think of something different. What we needed was a healthier, more nutritious, more gene-changing diet! And along comes Deep Nutrition! I know you’ve heard this before: we each have lost around 10 pounds in three weeks.

There will be more about this on my blog. Bon appétit! 

The Adventure Begins

A year ago, I hadn’t quite gotten to the idea of adventure! Adventure? Outside we were up to our knees in mud. Jim's office had been demolished to a dirt floor with 2x4s and jacks holding up the house. The good workers had quit. The inexperience or unqualified workers were in charge and the day-labourers didn't speak English. Well, I guess that is an adventure of sort, just not the kind of life I usually attribute to “adventure.”

While I wasn’t quite thinking about “adventure,” I did maintain the thought that somehow this was going to work out. Then good things started to happen. Friends showed up to help us fire the crooked contractor, hire the good workers back, and get a vision of how to complete the project. We started exploring the possibility of selling the house because it was obvious that our retirement money would not support the kind of bills we were paying!

In the midst of finishing the house and putting it on the market 6 months later, we made an offer for a beautiful house in Grass Valley, across the street from good friends. That’s when I started thinking that the adventure of the rest of our lives was about to begin. It wasn’t quite that easy.

The final tally of our repair and renovation was about $100,000 higher than we expected and our house didn’t sell right away and we had to lower the price. The owner of the pretty house with the beautiful grounds and garden wouldn’t come down on her price. I guess the adventure was to rethink our plans!

We had been living in our mountain home for several months and knew it was truly a vacation home and not a place we’d want to live permanently. We decided to look for a different home in Grass Valley that simply isn’t in the charming area we had come to love. The very first house we looked at was the one we bought. What a wise agent we had. She patiently took us to see many other houses after showing us that first gem. By the end of that weekend, we were in escrow for three properties. Buyers had arrived in Berkeley, we hadn’t cancelled the agreement on the first house and we were already in agreement on the second house. That’s an adventure right there.

Three months later, we moved into our new house! It was almost a year since we realized that we had to leave Berkeley and 6 months of that we lived in Fish Camp, CA. How is it that I have chuckled to myself so many times about how this adventure has begun. When I think about it seriously, I realize that I actually used Deliberate Attraction in its best possible way – asking for what I want and letting the universe decide how to give it to me. This didn’t turn out the way I had expected – it turned out better.

I’ve taught and written about Deliberate Attraction for many years and in the last year, I used it extensively. Here are some of the things and people I have attracted:

• Larry and Nadine who got us interested in living in Grass Valley.
• Bill helped us know how to fire the contractor and guided us to oversee the project.
• Hilberto and Javier with their family and friends returned to work joyfully and skilfully for us.
•  Kevin helped us diffuse our anger by preparing a lawsuit against the contractor. We never acted on it, but the process was cathartic.
•  Pam our support real estate agent in Grass Valley help with both agreements to buy homes.
• Barbara who so graciously allowed us to put only 1% down on her beautiful home and to wait 6 months to sell our house in Berkeley.
•  Don who wrote a thoughtful legal document for us to present to Barbara.
•  Kathie, who was the obvious choice to be our Berkeley real estate agent and whose expertise and wisdom kept us stable when our house didn’t sell as expected.
• Helyn whose wonderful home we bought. She and her husband created an unique space and we get to enjoy it and share it with friend sand family who visit.

How did I attract all that? It was basic. I believed it would all turn out OK. I admit that there were moments when I worried -- a lot of moments, actually. But under the worry, I felt patient and peaceful that everything would be good – even adventurous.

I learned to distract myself when things seemed bleak. Researching, buying, cooking, and eating nutritious food became favourite distractions – 15 pounds worth of distractions, but good distractions they were. When I would see Jim getting a little more frazzled than usual, I’d break out a jigsaw puzzle and that would soothe him for hours – even days.

While I relished the idea of being in Fish Camp in the winter, the snow didn’t come as expected. So I filled my days with clearing the yard of flammable debris and then I sent Christmas cards and letters and made Christmas presents – something I hadn’t done for years. We entertained a fair number of guests and eventually, it was February and we could move to Grass Valley.

We’ve been here three weeks today. We’re unpacked and settled and still pinching ourselves that this dream has come true. We are living in a fabulous house (better than I even imagined) and it’s just uphill from an adorable downtown. We’ve already had a lot of guests and expect a lot more. Life is very sweet. 

Changing My Thoughts

March, 2011


It’s been a long 8 months. After I won five new windows, saving us $5000, all hell broke loose. The windows are wonderful, but opening up the walls of the house revealed lots of damage. It’s an 85 year old house, but we didn’t expect to be replacing so much:

• The entire foundation
• Some of the walls
• Much of the framing
• The floor in one room
• All of the stucco
• Most of the wiring
• The roof

It’s been a miserable 8 months of living in construction and we’re spending our hard-earned retirement money like there’s no tomorrow, when in fact, we are intending to live a lot longer!

Something had to change, and the only change I can totally control is my attitude. Instead of waking up thinking this is awful, this is a disaster, this is stressful, this is a mess, I decided to think different thoughts. The first big advance was to think, “This is going to be a new house, and it’s costing only one third the price of a new house in our neighborhood!” Phew! That created a huge surge of positive energy.As the months dragged on and the project stalled because of rain, we started to feel very uncomfortable with the debt we were accumulating. By this time in our lives, we had thought we’d be debt free and instead we have more debt than we’ve ever had in our lives! Eventually, I realized that the Universe was giving us a push out of our nest and we could just fly to a new opportunity. We could sell the house and create a new adventure!

Talk about changing my thoughts. Since I became creative about our options, I am completely excited. Here are our current options:

1. We can sell this house and buy another house in a place we love where the cost of living is significantly lower. After paying off this reconstruction debt and paying cash for the new house, we’d be debt-free and even have money left over. What’s not to like about that?
2. We can sell this house and rent a place to live. The world is our limit – we can rent anyplace! Portland, Paris, or Pittsburgh. What would be fun?
3. We can keep this house and rent it out. Then we could buy an RV and travel all over North America and the travel and mortgage would be paid by the renters. When we come back, we can execute option 1 or 2!

Thoughts create our emotions which determine our actions that produce our results. I’ve moved from near despair to elation, practically over night. Let the adventures begin!