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.