It's lunchtime and Lisa Powers sits at a corner table, scanning the menu. Even before she orders, her plate is already full; her glass never empty.

That's because the part-time Granite Bay resident - a certified public accountant and CEO of her own tax firm, real estate investor and local restaurant owner - is always on the go. But instead of stressing over her busy schedule, she embraces it and makes celebrating life a priority.

On this particular afternoon, Powers has already been up for hours, waking at 3 a.m. to travel from her San Francisco home to her Granite Bay restaurant, Toast, to shoot an early morning segment for a local TV station.

In her "free time" between the taping and an 11 a.m. interview with The Granite Bay View, Powers talks with restaurant staff and inspects another Powers project, Quarry Ponds Town Center, which, coincidently, houses her newly opened restaurant.

"The ethic of the center is related to the community," she says of the 41,000-plus-square-foot development. "It's a friendly place where we can honor the joy of life."

The word "life" means something special to Powers, who, now at age 54, considers her own "not an ordinary one."

She tells of a time when her family lived in Japan. A teenager at the time, Powers, who could sing and learned to play the guitar at age 10, was invited to perform at a USO show.

"Someone heard me and I started playing at night clubs," she says. "I was just 16 or 17 years old."

This also introduced her to a group of about 20 other high school-aged girls with whom she'd visit injured soldiers at the five major U.S. military bases around Tokyo. Powers says she'd spend the day with "terribly wounded soldiers who needed a period of time to become physically and mentally ready to live life much differently than they did before."

These experiences still affect Powers and remind her on a daily basis to be grateful for the life she has.

Powers says she spent 2½ years in Tokyo, the last year by herself, a decision she made so she could finish high school with her friends.

After graduation, she returned to the Bay Area and eventually put herself through college, first at Sierra Community College then at Sacramento State. Her focus of study changed a few times, from foreign language to accounting, which she considers "the language of business," and finally to taxation and tax law.

Powers worked as a commercial real estate agent through college and opened a CPA firm in 1981. She eventually sold her practice because "it wasn't creative enough," and started investing in real estate.

Powers purchased five acres on Douglas Boulevard in Granite Bay in 1991, and opened the Quarry Ponds Town Center there in early 2007. In addition to Toast, which Powers co-owns with her boyfriend of nine years, the center includes at least four other restaurants, a handful of boutique shops, a salon and a fresh food market.

Powers also runs Powers Equity, a "boutique" tax practice in San Francisco.

"I really wanted to build this project," Powers says of the Granite Bay center. "A lot of real estate investors buy property and try to flip it. ... I consider myself an owner, not a developer. ... I tend to keep my projects. I tend to repair, rehab and improve them."

She says she's not afraid of hard work and in fact loves working hard.

"When you start out working at age 18 and pretty much getting to run your own life, if you put in a lot of hard work, you can really do a lot of cool things," she says. "Life is really what you make of it. You have to be true to yourself. In the end, you can say, it's just a life, or you can say, it's my life. Celebrating life is really important to me."