Financial Crisis Update

Purchased 66 Duck Woods Drive, vacant lot, April 2005 for $305,000
Received offer of $330,000 three months later. (Turned down because $20,000 in potential closing costs didn't make financial sense at the time, wanted to sell for $350,000 - Gary Dunstan, the agent on the other side of the deal will never let me live this down).
Made last lot payment on April 1, 2008. Got foreclosed on February 20, 2009. Bank sold property April 9, 2009 for $140,000. This is 46% of the price we paid for it in 2008 - or a 54% reduction in price in 3 years.


147 Holly Trail - finished construction summer of 2006. Owed $999,500.
Bank foreclosed and sold the house for $600,000

Unfreaking believable.

My House (at least the house that the owners let me live in)

First of the Summer

This is what I encountered upon my return from Mark's.....

"Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made"
Wayne Dyer

Lunch View

Beautiful day - lunch with Sonya on the deck of the Black Pelican Restaurant

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
Henry Ford

The Tailess Wonder

Shish Kabob

My New Friend

Thus far, we've had 3 encounters. He is so not afraid of me.

Thoughts from the Mat on My Birthday

"Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.

If it were always a fist or always stretched open, 

you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,

the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated

as bird wings."

~Rumi

I realized today that the practice is similar to a fist opening and closing, binding tightly gripped and then release, stretching out, over and over, in every possible way. Creation of a pose and destruction of the pose, moving on to the next, nothing is permanent, nothing lasts forever, but yet it still all the same. 

Life. 

Broccoli with Kasha and Black Bean Sauce

http://www.nutritionmd.org/recipes/view.html?recipe_id=695

(Wendy - you can subsitute brown rice or any other type of grain if you can't find kasha)

History

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."

Black Bean Hummus

http://www.fatfreevegan.com/appetizers/black.shtml
Mary - easy..... takes two seconds - corn tortillas, baked at 350 until crispy....

Polar Plunge In The Burg

"No emotion, any more than a wave, can long retain its own individual form." 
— Henry Ward Beecher

Shish Kabob's Teeth