We had chosen CarmelValleyVillage as destination of our planned Great Escape from the ModocPlateau, a concrete location to visualize living in and so create an energy to follow out. Lightning can't strike unless the stricken object first sends up a little tendril of request, and we imagined that's what our picturings were, in the energetic scheme of things.

It made sense, because Husband's siblings and mother all live in nearby Monterey, and his children from former marriage live or visit nearby. It would make it easier to keep in contact. And I had grown up in Southern California (when I wasn't exiled to the Iowa farm of my grandparents) and could easily imagine the environment there, familiar enough.

But the picture wouldn't hold, much as I loved the hot smell of baked earth and manzanita I conjured, and the sensation of dappled shade.

Next we chose Chicago, where Husband grew up and lived and worked for many years. He misses it often, I think, and still has friends there. I had no sense imagery to put with it - my only contact with Chicago was a 30-minute airport layover en route to New York in 1982 - but we collected photographs and websites and I was getting to know its layout pretty well.

Although it never felt quite right.

New York might never have occurred to us if we hadn't played around one day with location astrology to see where our planets and asteroids were best aspected. And there it was, New York City, shining like a great beacon across the basins and ranges and plains between here and there. As though made for us.

So here's a street map of Manhattan on the corkboard at the foot of my bed, and this week a promising series of dreams located there, in which I always get an apartment easily and easily afford it.

I think it could be the place for us to stay, for a while. That's what the stars say, anyway. Now to do something to make that lightning strike ...

"Knowledgeable." That's the key. It was only after beginning the input of new book inventory into the old online bookseller account that I remembered. It came up fuzzily, with a fringe of little question marks, but soon enough I had full recall of the fact that no money can be made whatever UNLESS you have listed at least several thousand titles. For one thing, there's the monthly fee for using the web site. For another, all that competition means that even a five-star rating can't help you much.

Sobering. What am I doing??? I thought. Do I REALLY want to get into all this again? If it isn't a full-time activity then it's just a giant energetic drain with no hope of profit. You're either in with both feet or not.

So ... not.

Whew. That was close.

***

Labored a third afternoon yesterday in the heat and dust with friendKathleen emptying the Bookworm shelves and making a space in my storage unit for the boxes therefrom. Today I lounge and study and recover, grateful for the unexpected gift of cool gray the morning brought.

I just read a study that says persons, like my brother, who have celiac disease, more often than not react to corn gluten, too. This explains why he hasn't bounded back as strongly as I'd hoped when I changed his diet two years ago. He has regrown about 60 percent of his hair, and I noticed yesterday a bunch of pale whiskers just visible on his pale cheeks. So we have made some progress. My main concern is bone loss, though. He gets smaller by the day and has developed scoliosis. I trot him 'round in the sun every day and give him supplements, but corn has been a big part of our diet.

Out with it, too, then. Damn.