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.