Oct.. 7-Visiting friends in SoCal

Tuesday I visited Dave Snedeker, his girlfriend Amy, and their new baby girl Ann at their beachfront apartment in Playa del Rey. Dave was overjoyed at fatherhood and it was an uplifting experience. His father Wally and step-mother Wanda were visiting there that week as well. As Dave ushered me up the steps, he advised me that just hours ago Wanda had learned that her older brother had killed himself.

Sitting on the deck overlooking a wide swath of sand and the ocean, enjoying a Southern Comfort, Dave and I had a chance to reminisce about his trip to Costa Rica that past winter, while his parents busied themselves making arrangements for a return the next day to family in Tennessee. I learned that while Wanda’s brother had some instability in his background, it was the failure of a recent tourist venture, caused by the collapsing economy, that put him over the edge. He had taken on debt to buy a campground in Canada, a story with foreboding overtones.

We had a nice dinner on the deck, and Dave encouraged me to expound on the nature of the credit collapse, which I was happy to do since I had been giving it much thought as of late. Dave is involved with venture capital for oil shale development and has a good understanding of finance, but the discussion was one of several that reinforced how politicized the whole mess has become. The blame game is in full force and in the early innings, and is shaped by people’s prior political persuasions. Not everyone is blaming the banks, to my surprise, and some, mainly conservative Republicans, are pointing to government policies that encouraged lending to minorities and low income people as the root of the subprime mortgage meltdown.

I explained my view that loans made as a direct result of these policies were relatively small, and that the large bulk of problem loans were not driven by these policies. However, I’m not willing to let Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac off the hook either, because they helped fuel the mortgage bubble. We missed the second Presidential debate that night, but I didn’t really miss it, having seen the first.

I spent the night there at Dave’s encouragement, and the next morning drove south in smooth comfort in Geneva’s Lexus, on my way to meet Ernie for lunch in Cardiff-by-the-Sea. After lunch we took a nice walk along the beach on the warm and sunny afternoon. Ernie and his real estate partner Pamela were fortunate to have sold their double lot in Nosara located near our houses in the K section earlier in the year, but he said the mood in California was pretty grim these days. However, he has been enjoying his life and getting in plenty of golf, now typically at discounted rates due to the economy. Ernie’s natural smile didn’t seem phased and he said he still has cash on hand waiting for the right real estate opportunity in the San Diego-Oceanside area. Concerns about a recent dent in his cash account were salved by a surfing session that morning. As I bid farewell, not expecting to see him in Nosara for some time, he gave me a recent CD of an Abraham-Hicks talk. I listened to it in the car later, a rumination on the Law of Attraction as expounded by the channeled spirit who calls himself Abraham. It fit right in with some other CDs I had been listening to called “Infinite Possibilities – The Art of Living Your Dreams’ by Mike Dooley. As summarized by Dooley, thoughts become things.

I have been giving a lot of consideration to the law of attraction lately, since it seems so relevant to the way my life has been unfolding over the years, and especially as it has led me to my new life in Nosara.