Sun in the Eighth

It's my experience that any manifestation of the Sun changing houses is strongest on the day it enters the new house. Right now this bricks and mortar house looks as though it's been burglarized. Drawers are pulled out, cupboard doors are open, the floor is strewn with little piles of books and assorted stuff and boxes are piled upon boxes all over the place.

Early this morning I opened the bottom drawer of a file cabinet I need to empty to make it available to my tenants-to-be and found two desk lamps I bought at Target probably four years ago. They have halogen bulbs, which burned out within months, and ever since I've been trying - admittedly very feebly - to get new bulbs. (I do need to say in my defense that the Target in question is two hours away by car in Las Cruces, and for anyone who's wondering, yes, I do have a telephone but have an aversion to pressing one and listening to advertising or canned music before I can press two.)

Probably two years ago I was in Cruces, as us locals call it, and remembered to go to the customer service window in Target to ask about new bulbs. I was given a phone number which I promptly wrote down in one of my numerous address books and have not been able to find since. I've been to Walmart and the two hardware stores here in Silver but couldn't find the bulb I was looking for. Once I found it on eBay and did a Buy It Now but the seller told me it was out of stock and she'd notify me when it came in. That was the last I heard from her.

So - the two very stylish desk lamps have been in the bottom drawer of an unused file cabinet for about four years. Actually, as they have flexible necks and had been shoved in there haphazardly, they've been stuck there for four years as I could never get the drawer open. Today, with no choice but to empty the thing out, I opened the top drawer, shoved my arm in as far as it would go, reached down to the bottom drawer and pushed, and lo and behold the drawer then opened and there were the lamps. (Mars square Jupiter perfects tomorrow.)

And there was my computer and there was Google and there was Light Bulbs etc.com and there was my credit card and there was me spending $4.99 each for four bulbs and $8.90 (!!!!!) for shipping on the day the Sun went into my eighth house, all so my tenants can have matching lamps for their bed-side tables and an empty file cabinet.


Of course, spending my own money was more second house than eighth, but once again those balls of rock and ice and gas came through. In the mail was a notice from Social Security telling me my early retirement benefit next year will be 5.8% more than it was this year and asking me to please check the other side of the letter to see exactly how it affects me. Exactly how it affects me is by raising my benefit from $957 to $1,012 (recession? What recession?) and giving me another - to me, at least - head-shakingly uncanny posting for this blog.

Sun Square Jupiter

The house is rented for the winter, which means I need to go through every drawer, cupboard and closet and get everything organized once and for all - or at least till I come back in May. I've made a start, but it's a bit daunting and I usually end up sitting by the fire watching House reruns before too long.

But there's a deadline involved - January 3, when the tenants arrive - and it's also Christmas, so this morning I started in earnest and now have piles of stuff all over the house - stuff for thrift shop, stuff for trash, stuff for regifting, stuff to take to New York, stuff to take to New York to take to Spain in case I do manage to get to go and see my sister, stuff to take up to the adobe to store, stuff to take to John's to wear there (he lives just outside Palm Springs and lets me leave the car there when I'm away for several months) and stuff that's better than trash but too good for a thrift shop that I'm deluding myself I'll sell. All very Sun square Jupiter, as there's no way I'll finish today, but it's all such a mess now I have no choice but to go on.

In the middle of all of this the new futon mattress from Overstock.com arrived. I had no idea how uncomfortable the futon/sofa in the addition was until this past summer, when the then tenant politely asked if she could bring in a rocking chair from the patio, but considering we bought it, frame and all, from Walmart in 2002 for about $80 I shouldn't have been surprised. The winter tenants, I know, plan to have guests, and there's no way I could knowingly inflict the old mattress on anyone other than the Sweet Pea - hence the Overstock.com purchase.

I didn't see the delivery truck till it was leaving the driveway, but there on the porch was a big cardboard box with bulging sides, four feet by two by one. It was too heavy to pick up but I was able to kick it through the living room into the addition and open it up. Tightly packed inside was the new mattress, covered in plastic. I had to struggle to get it out of the box but by alternately tugging and then upending the box as much as I could and shaking it, I managed it, cut the plastic and started to try to get it onto the futon frame.

Unwieldy doesn't even come close. It had been difficult enough, with help, to get the old mattress to the dump, but this new one seemed to weigh a ton. I'd get one corner of it a little way onto the frame, and then as soon as I tried to get another corner up, the first one would slide off. I'd go back and lug the first corner on again and the second one would fall off. Eventually I pulled the frame out from against the wall and tried to pull the mattress on by leaning over the back of the frame and doing it that way, but that didn't work either, and what was really strange was that the more I pushed and pulled and struggled with the thing, the more it seemed to expand and grow and get thicker and thicker and more and more impossible to maneuver. The thing was jupitering itself right in front of me.

Then I noticed the piece of paper on the floor. "This futon mattress has been vacuum packed for shiping [SIC] purposes. Please aloow [ALSO SIC] 24 - 48 hours for compressed internal fibers to return to their fully uncompressed form."

Now, it's really difficult to believe that any kind of divine intelligence would bother itself with arranging for a compressed mattress to arrive on the day the recipient's natal Jupiter was squared by the Sun, but I dunno. Can't spend too much time wondering about it though. I have a lot of packages to get shiped.

Uranus opposed to Jupiter

Holy Cow! I guess not having time to make an entry here since October 28th, day of the enchilada deliveries, is Uranus opposed to Jupiter.

Work picked up right after that, for a start. I have Jupiter in Virgo at the very end of the Fifth, and it turned out YB, the woman I work for and also a friend of 40 years, had the mistaken impression that I didn't want to work (!) and hadn't wanted to "bother me". (English punctuation) Once I pointed out my financial situation (9/11 settlement money all gone, massive, for me, house expenses, having to get a new heater, $2,000 on the tree trimming etc. etc, $1,000 on the old Volvo getting the brake lights to work) we got that straightened out and she began to send me work - MP3 files for me to transcribe into Word and send back. Thank God for the Internet as I can work from home in Silver, and as I never get the super-rush stuff the producers want back before they've sent it I can take breaks and go and wander around outside and water the plants or get in a few logs at a time, or at least I used to be able to, before Uranus opposed Jupiter.

Anyway, after weeks of what seemed like nothing happening, everything exploded: lots of transcribing work, work from an English astrologer I sometimes ghost write for, getting quotes on a new wall heater, getting quotes on the road washing away ($2,800 plus tax? I don't think so. Who with a Twelfth house Sun needs to be connected to the rest of the world ha ha?), driving to Tucson to pick up Randy, a friend, driving him straight back to Silver, deciding to have central heating ((! ) Pluto trine Venus, another Biggie in the Background) installed as it was only (!) $1,000 more than the not very effective wall heater, having it installed meaning three men climbing all over the attic cutting holes in the ceiling and walls for three days, the Canadian publishing house that is good enough to publish my plays asking for a blurb for the last one-act I wrote, Randy building me a broom closet in the kitchen where the old wall heater used to be, much hammering and sawing while I was trying to work, handyman coming and repairing the roof, the Sweet Pea not coming in till 10:00 pm because of all the activity and making me think he was following in the paw prints of his big brother who ran away and joined the circus round about the time of the first pass of Uranus opposing Jupiter, finding people on Craig's List Las Cruces who are willing to rent the house from January to May, 2009, with many emails flying back and forth, taking Randy back to Tucson and realizing it's three and a half hours, not three (he checked in with one minute to spare), driving three and a half hours straight back, friend from Santa Fe arriving same day one hour after I got back, both of us being invited out for lunch by a mutual friend the next day, going out for dinner with friends the night after that, November 15th, SF friend leaving early the day after and finally me leaving for New York that same day, November 16th, driving three hours to El Paso to the airport.

Might not seem like much, but to a country girl....

P.S. Third and final pass of Uranus opposed to Jupiter for me is January 8, 2009. Probably the date I leave Silver when my tenants arrive, if I dare make a prediction. You read it here first.

Mercury Trine Moon

Mercury came into its own this morning as ruler of cars and short trips and the Moon excelled itself representing motherly women and food. It was the day of the fund-raising enchilada dinner (lunch, really, or considering the time of the earliest requests, breakfast) for the Silver Stompers' Jamboree next year, and my contribution was to make deliveries. I was working with DQ, a fellow Stomper/line dancer. She was to drive and I was to hop in and out of the van with the deliveries. We met at 9:45 in the parking lot of the long-closed Long John Silver at the bottom of Little Walnut Road, where I left the Volvo and got in her whatever-it-is she drives.

When we arrived at the Knights of Columbus meeting Hall on Swan, five minutes away, it was obvious we were much too early. A cooking station had been set up in each corner of the hall, each manned (womanned?) by five Stompers: one frying tortillas, one putting in the filling and dipping them in red sauce, one working the egg
station, one at the pinto beans and one making sure the correct number of bags of bread, salad, dessert and silverware accompanied each order.

We knew they'd been there since six am and kept a respectful distance till summoned, when we took four orders to the Daily Press and six to Syzygy Tileworks, which I've never been able to pronounce and was glad I didn't have to, just walk in with the cardboard box and say "Who's hungry?" Back to the hall, four orders to J.D. Feed and two to SA Electronics, and we were done for the day, feeling only a little guilty at leaving all the clean up to the ones who'd been cooking all morning. The aspect perfected at 11:21 and I was back home sweeping up Juniper berries by noon. You just can't make this up.

Venus Trine Uranus

There's to be a line dancing jamboree in Silver City next June, the first to be held here, as I understand it. It's going to be expensive to put on so between now and then there'll be a variety of fund-raising efforts. The first is on Tuesday October 28th, when for six dollars you can buy an enchilada dinner with bread and salad, with egg and onions optional. Along with the other beginner line dancers, I was given an order sheet with space for 20 dinner purchasers to list their names, delivery address if they weren't picking up, whether or not they wanted onions and/or eggs and if they did, whether they wanted them OE or SSU. A grand total of 466 dinners were sold, none of them by me - an impressive total considering there are only 10,000 people in the town.

I missed the planning meeting for the dinner as I was in New York, so was a bit vague on the details. All I knew was anyone willing to help was to show up at the senior center on Sunday "to help wrap silverware in napkins." It sounded a lot less labor-intensive than gathering wood and as with my Jupiter in Virgo I live to serve, I
was there on time at 1:30 ready to wrap.

There were a dozen or so women bustling around in the kitchen and another dozen already in place on an assembly line, opening loaf after loaf of sliced bread and putting two pieces into little Ziploc bags. On a table in the middle of the room were stacks of styrofoam boxes and a woman with a clipboard explaining to a dozen very serious looking women what to do - work from the order sheets, write the recipient's name and delivery address on the outside top of the box and write O, OE or SSU on the inside, check off each box on the order sheet, be sure to keep all deliveries to the same place together etc. etc. - way too complicated for a Sunday afternoon.

On a table all by themselves were 12 boxes each of plastic knives and forks, no napkins. Evidently Lucinda had told Edith Ann she had bought them but had told Caroline she hadn't because they were cheaper at Walmart, and nobody knew where Lucinda was to confirm. A discussion about whether the egg marking should go inside or outside the box was heating up at the clipboard table, complete with top flipping demonstration, and I backed off into the kitchen, asking the first person I saw if there was anything I could do to help.

Cheese, she said, and handed me a pair of latex gloves, a hairnet and a 18-inch long 8-inches in diameter orange roll, to be cut into pieces small enough to go into the spout of a food processor for grating. For the next hour and a half I stood in between two whirring Cuisinarts and sliced up that wheel and another four. When one of the machines burned out it was decided we could all take small amounts of cheese home for grating there, so long as all grated cheese was at the Knights of Columbus Hall by 6 am on Tuesday morning. By studiously beginning to clean bits of trodden-in cheese off the tile floor, I was able to ensure all bags of cut cheese had been apportioned out before I was finished.

As if in retribution for my deviousness, when I snuck cheese-less out the door and took off my latex gloves, a large chunk of skin came off my index finger with them, revealing a half-inch blister. Suitably Neosporined and Band-Aided, I can rest up on Monday for delivery day on Tuesday.

Venus Trine Pluto

If Venus trine Pluto is a foreshadowing of what Pluto trine Venus will bring, there'll be a false obituary for me running somewhere at the end of November and a lot of people will be needlessly upset.

I'd been outside getting in the wood (what else do I ever do?) when I thought of a correction I wanted to make to one of these posts, and came inside to do it. While I was at the computer, I heard a neighbor calling my name from the front porch and went to see what he wanted. He was visibly agitated and the first thing he said when I opened the door was "Thank God. Are you all right?"

Obviously I was, if a little confused, and when, still agitated, he went on to say he'd seen my car in the driveway and the windows open, I said, well yes, the car's there because I'm home and the windows are open because I cooked onions last night. Only then did he tell me he'd had a call from yet another neighbor who lived further away (neighbor is relative out here) asking him to come and check on me, and it turned out all this was because I hadn't immediately answered an email from a Cancerian woman I know. This had promptly led her to conclude I'd killed myself, and she'd called neighbor number two to come check on me, presumably to pick up the body for removal to the morgue, and he'd passed the errand on to the neighbor who lives closer...

All very Plutonian, for sure, but to an Aries with Uranus in the first who's been living alone for 30 years, just a little OTT, if you know what I mean.

Venus Sextile Neptune

So is it Venus and Neptune sending me off into dreamland and making me light the fire at nine in the morning, wrap myself in the luxurious terrycloth robe a friend who DOESN'T have Venus in Aries gave me and curl up with the New Yorker, or am I doing all of that because after three days of chucking logs down the hill and sitting on a milk crate weeding, I can barely move anyway and apart from going back to bed there isn't too much choice of activity?

Whatever the answer to the above is, I'm pretty sure it was Venus, a couple of hours later, that had me wrestling the top off the jar of chocolate ganache, a gift from a house guest in July, that had been sitting on the pantry shelf ever since. Now that I'm following the Refrigerate After Opening instructions on the label and it's safely behind the eggplant tapenade and okra pickle spears on the top shelf, I'll say only that if you are going to mix chocolate ganache with peanut butter, microwaving for ten seconds before eating is the way to go.

In the Background

While all these little day to day things are happening - getting in the wood, the mail being put in the wrong mailbox - there are all the underlying major transits going on, not to mention progressions which I haven't yet gone near.

For me, the biggie long-term aspects happening now are Pluto square Chiron (third transit just passed, never to happen again), Uranus opposed to Jupiter (just exact retrograde, exact again January 8, 2009, but who's counting?), Pluto trine Venus (exact for the third and last time November 19, 2008) and the dreaded Chiron to the Moon, exact for the last time January 11, 2009.

The first pass of Chiron to the Moon coincided with the first pass of Uranus opposed to Jupiter in March of this year. My beloved Fluff, never a particularly domesticated cat, manifested the U/J for me by running away to join the circus, while Chiron to the Moon became the gut-wrenchingly horrible weeks of putting up posters, setting a humane trap night after night, driving around looking for him, etc. etc. (Sweet Pea is the result of returning the trap to the animal shelter and making the mistake of going to the boys' room to see if Fluff was there.)

I manifested my own Jupiter/Uranus let-me-out-of-here by getting my 19-foot-long ancient Volvo stuck in between the compost and lava-rock aisles in Walmart's garden section, and then having to sit looking as nonchalant as possible while garden man went off to get a forklift to move some of the compost. Felines ten, humans one.


Second pass of Chiron to the Moon coincided with transiting north node in the eleventh, and I found myself going to a beginner's line dancing class at the senior center (!) here in Silver City, NM. Thirty women, one extraordinarily brave man. I had a tenant for two months in the summer who was born eight days after me in 1945, so we had much (by no means everything) in common and it was she, Miss Moon in Gemini interested in everything, who told me about the line dancing classes. On the day the Chiron/Moon conjunction was exact, I was dancing in bare feet, as I'd dropped a large rock on my left little toe while engaging in what is laughingly known here as gardening, and several women I had never spoken to before came up to me and expressed concern I'd damage my feet by not wearing shoes. (Uranus in Pisces is also in eleven for me now.)

With the transiting north node now moving on beyond my natal Moon, it's more and more difficult to get myself to those twice-weekly classes - I missed today but it wasn't my fault ha ha - but I'm doing the best I can, read maybe I'll go on with it, maybe I won't. Like Diana with her face on the tea towels though, I've bought the dancing shoes, so maybe I will.

The second U/J pass a few weeks ago sent a cat I've never seen before strolling across the driveway and a neighbor calling to tell me he'd found a kitten outside his back door, and I sometimes wonder if the third and final opposition will bring Fluff back. I heard so many "my cat went missing and came back after three/six/nine months" stories I can almost let myself think he'll reappear.

When it comes to Pluto trine Venus, my hands come off the keyboard and I sit here staring at the screen. I was fortunate enough to study astrology with Michael Lutin. Along with "Healing the past and living in the present creates the future" and "The slowest moving planet wins", "Read the fine print" is one of the many things he said that's stuck in my brain ever since. Unless I'm falling in love with the Sweet Pea, I think I need to move up to 2.5s.

Mercury Trine Uranus

According to the cookbooks, this aspect should have you mentally wide-awake and bursting with new ideas, experimenting with all kinds of ground-breaking solutions to old problems, and deciding to take yourself off on a jaunt to somewhere you've never been before.

I'm not sure that calling your sister in Spain qualifies as any of the above, but that's what I did in the morning and then it was back to the woodpile, stacking more logs and getting one of the piles covered with a tarp before the bad weather sets in.

My staying power as far as throwing logs around goes is minimal. Five minutes and I'm out of breath and have to do something else for a while. Most of my beautiful cornflowers are dead now but I still can't bring myself to pull them up, so I started taking cuttings from the ivy that's threatening to overrun one of the flowers beds and transplanting it to other bare patches where I think it will do well.

The weather here right now - mid October, a time when I'm rarely here - is beautiful. Clear,sunny, dry, 75 degrees or so during the day, mid-40s at night, and I'm trying to make the most of it. It was an extraordinarily wet summer with no chance to even think about weeding in between thunderstorms, so after sticking my few stalks of ivy into new ground and giving them a drink I suddenly decided to start weeding the driveway, which can only be described as a complete exercise in futility.

Aha, though, I thought - Mercury, hands, I'm doing something unexpected, Uranus, and sat myself down on an upturned milk crate with my weeder tool and started pulling up some of the grasses embedded in what's left of the gravel after the rains washed most of it away. I was tastefully attired, as I always am when gardening, in a pair of paint-spattered bike shorts and a 25-cent t-shirt with the sleeves cut off from Gospel Mission thrift shop, but as I'm at the end of a dirt road and always know when someone's coming I never need to be "dressed".

The Sweet Pea was stretched out in the sun nearby, I was chatting away with myself as is my wont when alone - natal retrograde Mercury in twelve? - and I must have cleared a good two square feet of the 7,500 square foot driveway when a standard issue New Mexico pick-up truck came lumbering along and a neighbor jumped out waving a handful of envelopes and magazines. "Mailman put all your mail in my box", he said, handing it to me, wishing me a good evening, and finally manifesting Mercury trine Uranus for me for the day. It simply never fails, this astrology stuff.

Mercury Sextile Pluto

This is probably something best kept to myself, but with Mercury symbolizing thinking and communication and Pluto obsessed with getting to the bottom of things, it's taken me two solid hours to figure out how to link What I Told My Friend to How Things Began.

Yes, I know it's easy, I know there's Blogger Help, I know there's hundreds of Help websites but time and time again when I clicked on what was supposed to be a link I'd made, I'd get taken back to - is it Dashboard? - where you can edit past posts and publish new ones, never to the posted post (?) I wanted on the blog.

I think where I went off track was reading about right-clicking on the URL, which supposedly gives you a shortcut to use as the link. There aren't any buttons on the mouse I use and I wasted a lot of time trying to find how to do the equivalent on a Mac.

Finally I downloaded the blog's source code and used the archive links. They work.

Mars Square Pluto

The last time these two planets came into what us in the know call challenging aspect for me I attempted to maneuver a friend's SUV into its car port after taking him to the two-hour-away airport and ended up scraping most of the paint off its left side - he didn't tell me to go all around the circular driveway and then make the approach directly into the car port. I simply made a right turn and tried to get the thing in that way. Never mind, it's only money.

This time, instead of going to Walmart as I'd thought I might do, I found myself up the hill attempting to stack the firewood resulting from my recent Urban Interface extravaganza. This is a New Mexico program by which the home/landowner is enabled to make defensible space around his or her dwelling, as it's called, safe from forest fires by having dead trees removed, so that should there be a fire, the flames will have nowhere to jump and will burn themselves out before doing any damage.

In theory, this is supposed to cost the lucky homeowner nothing, but as the program was initiated several years ago and the subsidized amount alloted to the wood cutters hasn't changed while their costs have all increased, said lucky homeowner is often required to shell out loads of moolah for the privilege of staggering down a hill lugging an Ikea bag full of logs which then have to be stacked near his or her dwelling to be eventually carted inside the house to fuel the open fire which is the only source of heat in what is laughingly called the living room, where said lucky homeowner sits and shivers from November to April and wishes he or she had had the sense to leave the eight foot ceilings and not open them up to fifteen feet. Never mind, this lucky homeowner likes going to bed at eight thirty.

So, bearing the moral of the SUV story - brute force is not good - very much in mind and being careful not to chuck a tree stump at the cat by mistake, this homeowner spent several hours throwing logs down the hill closer and closer to the house and eventually stacking them one on top of the other to make it easier to cover them with a tarp, marveling all the time at the awesome in the true sense of the word Progressed Horoscope. More in other posts.

How Things Began

That's the title of a radio program I used to listen to in school in England, sitting on the floor with the rest of Macaulay Street Primary as a BBC announcer told us all about how the fish climbed out of the sea and their fins turned into legs and then there were monkeys, none of which has anything to do with this blog but I'd like to explain where the idea for it came from and I've always liked that title.

It's been twelve years since I "discovered" astrology - not the sun sign stuff you read in newspapers (not that there's anything wrong with that) but the real having your own birth chart drawn up, beginning to understand the meaning of the symbols, looking at your life in light of that knowledge and realizing that yes, Virginia, those balls of gas and rock and ice whizzing around the sun at varying speeds and distances really do have some bearing on life here on earth, much as you'd like to believe that can't possibly be true because of course we're all masters of our own destiny and can do anything and be anything we set our minds to. Yeah, right.

The initial rush that realization caused has long since worn off, but having an inquiring mind, a tendency towards obsession and too much time on my hands, I've been tracking the movement of the planets in the sky ever since, seeing what angles they make to my natal birth chart and recording the corresponding events.

Depending on your point of view, this has left me with either a useless collection of three ring binders stuffed full of astrology charts covered with illegible handwriting, incomprehensible symbols, crossings-out, exclamation points, arrows and underlining, or a valuable research study detailing how in my life the maxim "as above, so below" has worked itself out.

A couple of weeks ago I was telling a friend - as it happens, the friend who introduced me to astrology in the first place - that I'd just read a Mountain Astrologer interview with Robert Hand in which he was asked if he believed in astrology. His answer was he didn't believe in it, he experienced it, and I told her a couple of recent mind-boggling experiences of my own illustrating exactly that (See What I Told My Friend).

You have to do a blog, she said, and that's how things began.

What I Told My Friend

At the beginning of September this year, Saturn was directly opposing the placement of Mars in my natal horoscope.

There had been plenty of frustration in the days leading up to the exact opposition, most especially the day the cat decided to go missing just as I was about to leave on a weekend trip. There was nothing to do except wait for him to come back. I spent the time reading old copies of the New Yorker, calling the friend I was going to visit with hourly updates - he's down the barn, I can see him but he won't come up the hill - he's behind the well house now - grinding my teeth and reminding myself what an awesome thing it is to be so connected to the workings of the universe. Frustrating yes, mind-boggling, no.

That came two days later when the opposition was exact. I was driving into town to run an errand, didn't have the exact address of the store but knew vaguely where it was, and as I turned on to the main road I heard a furious honking and saw a stationery school bus on the other side of the street, that little lollipop STOP sign sticking out facing me. (Maybe in cities there's a higher-tech version of this, but that's what school buses are like in the small town I live in.) There's a 30 mph speed limit on the road anyway because of deer, and I'd only just turned on to it, so was almost able to stop as though I meant to, not because I'd only just seen the sign. Avoiding the bus driver's eye, I waited till he was safely past me before I stepped on the gas, telling myself this was a bit literal even for astrology and reminding myself to be more careful.

A couple of miles further into town I saw Men at Work and Reduced Speed Ahead signs, and then a workman standing in the road holding a STOP sign as he let cars on the other side of the road pass. This was a bit more connected to the universe than I wanted to be. I considered turning around and going home, but went on into town and found the stretch of highway where I needed to be cordoned off because of roadworks and reduced to one lane only. I kept on going, drove back home the long way around and did the errand the next day. Maybe you had to be there.

A few weeks after that, Mars came to oppose my natal Sun. A man I know had asked me to meet him at an auto interior renovation place where he was dropping off an old car that needed new upholstery. Then I was to drive him back to his house, drop him off so he could drive another car that needed cosmetic work to the renovation place, follow him there and then drive him back home again.

Everything went well. I was at the shop on time to pick him up, no problems on the way to his house, no problems following him back to the shop, no problems whatsoever. Nothing at all remarkable, except I decided to get out of my car while I was waiting for him and wandered over to the office, where on the wall outside a hand-painted sign in capital letters read MARS (Meticulous Attention Renovation Service, when I asked). With apologies to Dave Barry, I am not making this up. It's what I told my friend and why she said I had to do a blog.