Sun trine Pluto

I really like pasta (there IS a point to this) but never make it because of the cooking time, gallons of water, mess, and a natal north node in Cancer. I've seen those glass tube cooking things advertised on late night TV where you put the pasta in, pour boiling water on top and screw on a lid for ten minutes or so, but have never been tempted to buy (natal Saturn in the Second).

Imagine my delighted surprise (!) when I fell across an article in the Times last week describing a way to cook pasta by sauteeing it like a risotto, slowly adding water or stock until all the liquid is absorbed and the spaghetti/macaroni/linguine/whatever is all plumped up and cooked. No bringing massive quantities of water of water to a boil, no boiling over of starchy water messing up the stove, no trying to pick up great big pots of boiling water when you only have one oven mitt, no splashing boiling water over yourself when you try to drain the pasta in a colander - just easily cooked pasta as al dente as you would like because you can test it as you go along. Admittedly, you have to stand there at the stove and stir it every now and again, but I've never been one not to be willing to make sacrifices for a good cause.

And what better day to attempt the method for the first time than when my creative self was in perfect harmony with the transformative powers of the Universe, your friend and mine, Pluto the Dwarf Planet?  I was pushing a grocery cart aimlessly around Gristede's an hour before the aspect perfected wondering what to have for dinner when I remembered the Times article, and five minutes later I was swiping my card at the checkout counter for a packet of linguine, a bottle of clam juice and a jar of Progresso White Clam Sauce.

Five minutes after that I was standing at the stove in the kitchen breaking strands of linguine into three pieces and dropping them into a sizzling mixture of butter and olive oil in a heavy-bottomed Le Creuset pot. I went from the essence of the article, so to speak, and made most of it up as I went along. If I had followed the recipe I probably wouldn't have had brown crispy bits of linguine, but they turned out in the end to be quite tasty once they'd absorbed all the clam juice diluted with an equal amount of water. In 15 minutes I had a big fat pot of linguine and clam sauce and 10 minutes after that I'd eaten most of it. Thank you, Dwarf Planet. I have to go watch 'House' now.

Mercury trine Pluto

Is this what's gotten me to post here again after weeks? Who knows? I think it definitely got me to learn how to do a hanging indent in Word to comply with a transcribing client's wishes, not that it was too difficult. All you have to do, if you have natal Jupiter in Virgo at the end of 5 ha ha, is go to the Help menu
of whatever program you need help with and type in your question.

As when I transcribe I use macros, which take you out of MS Word and put you in some nightmarish programming place I can't even remember the name of, I didn't hold out much hope when I went to ask about hanging indents. (Was this Sun sextile Chiron, exact today as well?) To my grudging admiration, Mr. Gates came through - not only with a graphic representation of the kinds of indents possible, but with easy-to-understand instructions that let me create exactly the format my client needed. (Oh, how I love to say "my client" after three months without work. Is THAT Sun sextile Chiron?)

Who knows? Who knows anything? Please contact if you do.

Jupiter to the Moon

November seventh? That's when I last posted here? Obviously there is a vast right-wing conspiracy preventing me from posting every day as I (think I) would like, but I shall soldier on regardless and document the manifestation in my life of the subject transit.

Having the ceiling fall in on your computer and chair you sit in while at the computer is not one of the first things that comes to mind when I think of Jupiter to the Moon. I thought that perhaps the transit would bring the next chapter in the saga of the stripping of the shutters, as three years ago, when Jupiter squared the Moon, I took it upon myself to begin the horrendous task of stripping the wooden shutters in this apartment down to the bare wood. I did as much as can be expected from an Aries - a half-assed job of getting a lot, but nowhere near all, of the paint off - taking the shutters off  their hinges but never putting them back on, that kind of thing - but my predictive powers proved as accurate as always and nothing involving shutters has happened, only the ceiling falling on the computer and chair.  Moon is easy - it happened at home - and not actually being in the chair when it happened is probably the Jupiter part. (With natal Jupiter in Virgo, I'd just taken the cobbled-together pages of a play I'd worked on the night before into  the living room to spread out on the table there when it happened.)

Another home-/moon-based event -  a friend who's lived in this building for 30 years giving up her apartment  and moving out of state - is probably more related to "my" upcoming Pluto/Saturn opposition I've been eyeing with trepidation for years than to a Jupiter to the Moon manifestation, in spite of her leaving me with a lot  of stuff.

"If" Saturn/Pluto means structure you've taken for granted in your life  passing away,  her moving leaves me with the distinction of being the only tenant in the building until the landlord's son (AKA The Young Massa) moves into the apartment on top of me which is being totally refigured and renovated for him, hence the ceiling falling down on top of my computer.

It's all very a butterfly flaps its wings in a rain forest and a train goes off the tracks in New Jersey, but the good news is my landlord buys me a new iMac without blinking an eye as he's aware enough to know he could be paying for coma woman in Lenox Hill for the next 10 years. Don't have his data.

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Larger Natal Chart

I have absolutely no idea how this happened and have only just discovered it's here. I've been trying for months to have this image appear whenever anyone (I should be so lucky) clicked on "See full-size image" on my profile page. All you ever get when you do that is see another ridiculously small image of my natal chart, which tells you absolutely nothing. So somehow, in my poking around in Blogger Help, I must have come up with something that resulted in a link to this bigger image. So all I have to do now ha ha is figure out how I get this to show up when someone clicks on "See full-size image," instead of it being here as a regular posting, not that I do regular postings, ha ha.

Venus Opposed to Venus

Venus is ruled by Taurus, which rules stuff, and I am overwhelmed with stuff today.

My upstairs neighbor, someone I've known since 1963 (!), is moving out and emptying her apartment. A lot of the furniture has takers, including me. I get a beautiful skinny console table on castors, designed to pull up over a bed so the occupant can work from between the sheets. I won't be using it that way, but it's perfect for going long side against a wall in a railroad flat. I've been putting what doesn't have a home to go to on Craigslist. This morning we took three big bags of clothes to a thrift shop, came home and went through the pile of kitchenware, books, office equipment, clothes, shoes, handbags, sheets, towels and bed-linens etc. that she's been sorting out.

So far today I have magazine holders, a big Ali Baba-looking wicker basket with a lid that the cat is terrified of, plastic storage boxes, a brand new Ralph Lauren white cotton over-sized sweater, five astonishingly beautiful enamel cooking pots from France, three just as beautiful decorative French molds for making mousse (one shaped like a lobster, two like a fish, which of course I shall be making full use of when I give my smart dinner parties over the winter), twenty sheets of high quality construction paper in a roll and a bottle of Vitabath, and it's not yet half-past two.