Pluto opposed to Saturn Exact

Okay, so maybe it wasn't a very good idea to leave Boston for New York on the Bolt Bus at 3:00 pm on the Friday of the weekend before Christmas. We didn't hit rush hour traffic in New York but we did in New Haven, Stamford, Hartford and whatever other places you come through on that route, so the bus was an hour and five minutes late when it got to 34th and Eighth at 8:05.

No way on earth to get a cab but I gave it a go anyway walking up Eighth, finally giving in at 42nd Street and deciding to take the subway. I managed to lose my temporary old person's reduced MTA pass, so was using the official photo ID one for the first time, with no luck whatsoever when I swiped it through a turnstile. Maybe there's no $$ on it, I thought, although dimly remembering I'd put a big $10 on it with an automatic refill.

Nothing to do but buy a full price Metrocard, but being as thrifty, money-conscious or cheap, whatever you want to call it, as I am, I wanted to spend as little as possible and fumbled around for two dollar bills and a quarter to get a Single Ride card and after waiting 15 minutes for a train, got to 86th and Broadway where I could use the card to take the crosstown bus to a block and a half from my apartment.

Another long wait, but eventually the bus arrived and I got on, stuck my newly purchased Metrocard into the slot and  "Already Used" shows up on the LED monitor. "But I just bought it" I say, straw sticking out of my hair, rosy cheeks shining in the wintry air. "I just bought it 20 minutes ago." "What does it say there?" says the bus driver. "Already Used," I say, going on to repeat "But I just bought it 20 minutes ago."

"What does it say on the front?" says the bus driver, and, with as much dignity as I can muster under the circumstances, I'm forced to say "I don't know. I didn't have my glasses on." "Single ride," he says. "Single ride. No transfers." Shit, I think, I don't belong in New York any more I'm so clueless, I don't belong in Cambridge sleeping in the hallway, I don't belong anywhere any more, I'm this nomadic nothing, and I turn and go back down the front steps of the bus and walk to the corner of 86th and Broadway ready to hail the next available cab.

There's a honking from the bus and the driver is beckoning me to get back on, so I climb up the steps one more time and he gestures for me to go towards the back of the bus and take a seat - my natal Saturn Neptune square kicking in and coming to my rescue, I suppose it being obvious to him that I am a clueless out-of-towner groping my way through the labyrinth of rules and regulations of the big city and taking the bus back to Pumpkin Center at the end of the week and not some conniving manipulating very street-wise New Yorker.

"Ah, that's nice of him" says a woman on my left as I walk down the aisle to find a seat. "He's giving you a chance," the meaning of which I'm still trying to figure out but who cares, nice city bus driver took pity on poor pitiful Just-Got-Off-The-Bus farm-girl and only seven-and-a-half hours after I left XXX Concord Avenue, I arrived at 1674 First Avenue to find my wireless mouse had decided to die and I had no way to read email or the Daily Mail and the only thing to do really was to go to bed.

Second Waxing Saturn Square Saturn

So now I have a full understanding of how my natal Saturn square Neptune works - floating around in a dream world half the time, work work working away the other half. After yesterday's purposeless piddlings, reality set in and I realized having a house guest meant getting the addition ready for human habitation and going up to Santa Fe meant packing clothes to wear whilst there.

Thus began a great emptying of drawers and sorting of clothes, discovering long-searched-for and considered lost items of clothing, rummaging up in the adobe for a travel bag, making space in a closet in what was to be "my" side of the house once I got back from the north with the friend I'd be staying with up there, remembering the drawers under the day bed in the dining room, remembering that if I took the wooden mattress support off the day bed there was even more storage space to be had, carrying this pile here and this pile there, ironing ironing ironing as while I'm happy here in Silver to be a runner-up Person of Walmart in Wrinkled Clothing I have standards to uphold in Santa Fe as an emissary from the south - in short about eight hours of nonstop domestic labor before deciding I'd do the rest in the morning before I left ha ha and falling into bed.

Second Saturn conjunct Neptune

Complete and utter opposite of social butterfly act of yesterday. Stayed in house and on *property* all day, mainly because too exhausted to move much.

Put on t-shirt, neck felt tight, put a hand on each side and tugged and broke the chain of the protective angel 9/11 symbol have been wearing daily since being given same in October 2001. Picked up pieces for repair; aware of symbolism of chain.

Poked around in garden, decided to take nap, read New Yorker but couldn't sleep, got up, poked around a bit more, went to bed, couldn't sleep, kept trying to remember the way I felt wasn't the way I feel normally (?), woke up at three, got up at four, went through paperwork ignored for months, wrote this. Going back to bed.

Uranus conjunct Part of Fortune

With a part of fortune in Pisces in the twelfth it isn't very likely to bring me financial gain, no matter what planet lands on it. Only once since I've been tracking transits has it happened, and that was seven years ago in Las Vegas when Venus conjuncted it. Appropriately enough, I was sitting at a dollar Wheel of Fortune machine and lo and behold, the pointer stopped at the $1,000 mark. Never happened before, never happened since, not that I spend too much time in Las Vegas.

Uranus sitting on top of my PoF last week coincided (yeah, right) with the final collage class I've been taking at the Stanley Isaacs Senior Center, near where I live. About 15 of us, with the guidance and support of an out-reach person from the Whitney, put together over six weeks a three panel collage of the center, measuring about eight feet by nine in total, and evidently the biggest ever constructed to date by the program. 

Last Wednesday we were all invited to the Whitney for a personal tour of the Biennial, given by the ever-patient out-reach person who helped us with the collage, and then taken into a conference room where the individual collages we'd made in the class had been photographed and matted and were on display, along with the original collages. Photographs of our masterpiece - too big to transport - were projected onto a screen while we all sat around and ate chocolate biscuits - (Venus was opposed to Neptune for me that day as well, to enhance the sugar and the art aspect) - chatting away to members of the out-reach program and nodding sagely at any connections they drew between our art work and "real" artists. Of course I intended my collage to evoke the Bauhaus. Why else would I have used a photograph of a mop and bucket and another of the wheels on a garbage can? We all got a Whitney shopping bag to take our masterpieces home in, and were also given a pair of passes to go back whenever we want and check out the parts of the Biennial we missed. Nearly as good as a thousand dollars.

A better than a thousand dollar aspect came into play the next day, when I left my wallet in the supermarket, didn't realize if for six hours, and found it had been handed into the manager's office when I went back for it. My big $25 was still in it, my driver's license, my credit card, Duane Reade card, library card, MetroCard, life in general - all still inside and all I had to do was give my name to get it back. It's so corny I can barely write it, but life's just a great big wheel of fortune, and it was on my side last week.