Mercury Trine Chiron

Oh good, nothing I want more than the chance "to develop a deeper understanding of those psychological areas that are connected with the experience of pain, suffering and rejection" (Astrodienst again) - I haven't had quite enough of that this year yet. 

I did get another dose, though, yesterday, after visiting the country house and garden where Those Who Cannot Be Named For Fear Of Violating Their Privacy spend their weekends and, presumably helped along by the transiting south node in Gemini in *my* first house, feeling anew that there's nowhere in the Bay State where I shall ever feel that I belong. Should I be optimistic and insert "so far" between "State" and "where"? (Not a bad idea, as I rented a 10' x 5' storage space for my New York belongings five minutes from said house yesterday ha ha.)

It was left to a four-year-old, however, to twist the knife after it had been thrust in. Riding back to Bean Town, she was asked to keep her voice down to spare my trauma victim hearing, usually referenced (and then by me) only when I'm in a room with a television and a commercial comes on.  "Why?" she said. "It's not her car." 

Talk about out of the mouths of babes and pre-kindergartners; my current life in a nutshell - it's not my anything. Sheesh. It's a very good thing I have some understanding of astrology and know that this too shall pass. (And speaking of astrology, isn't Gemini small children?)

Jupiter on the Ascendant

Well, I wouldn't call going to counseling and bawling your eyes out because you're leaving the place you lived in for 38 years feeling good and projecting warm positive energies out into the world, but you can't win 'em all and we get back to the slowest moving planet wins and Saturn squaring the Midheaven, forcing me to, er, examine my *goals* and wonder where I'm going in life.

And the answer to that is down to Randolph tonight to register for a 10 x 5 storage space so Small Local Moves can drive down to New York this weekend and pick up my stainless steel mixing bowl and my copy of the I Hate To Cook Book to languish under lock and key until and if I come back to the east coast after a summer in the southwest.

Ah yes, expanding my circle and meeting people I wouldn't ordinarily come across, especially people in power like the genius at the Apple store who told me it would take five to seven days to  repair my MacBook Air and then asked if there was anything else he could help me with.

Oh well - time for me to go and pick up SC from school and become a woman of the world.

Jupiter Trine Midheaven

Boundless enthusiasm? Not quite the way I'd describe the way I've been feeling for the past couple of days, although yesterday I did manage to pry myself off the couch, take a couple of bags of stuff to the thrift shop and carry six old gallon cans of paint down to the ground floor and leave them by the trash cans.


Those major feats accomplished, it was time to gather up the unopened Christmas cards I carry back and forth from Cambridge to New York every time I go, shove them back into the wheelie bag, pick out a few choice items from my 38-year tenancy that I've decided I want to carry on into my oh-so-eagerly-awaited *new life* (this time: my father's old Players Please tobacco tin that I keep safety pins in, a copy of Alan Bennett's The Laying On Of Hands, two of my father's ties (hmmmm....) and six stainless steel coat hangers) and make my way back to 31st and Eighth to wait for the bus.


Tomorrow: Jupiter on the Ascendant. Stay tuned.

Venus Is Retrograde - Here Come The Old Friends

So Venus stations retrograde on Wednesday and Friday night I walk into what used to be called home and a card's been pushed under the door from someone I worked with at Oppenheimer in the days when I got a paycheck every two weeks and haven't seen for ten years and there's a message on the answering machine from someone else I haven't seen for twenty - not bad for the first two days.

The Haven't Seen for Twenty isn't too surprising as a week or so ago I managed to respond to the Christmas Card she sent six months ago and actually wrote a response back, which she has now presumably read, but the Haven't Seen for Ten is completely out of the blue, to coin a phrase.

Perhaps HSF Ten comes under the Mars Square Uranus that perfected at noon today, although I think a little more action is involved in that case than reading a card.

As it happened, I was attempting at that time to send a photo of the Cuisinart I'm selling on Craigslist to an interested party using my non-smart cellphone. As there's been no response from Interested Party, I was probably not successful, but it was the best I could do as I came down once again from Cambridge without the USB  connection cord for my camera.

I believe there's a strong case to be made here for "The slowest moving planet wins," as with Saturn all but stationed a degree off squaring my Midheaven there's not much I can think about except what the f*!@ am I doing.

Mars Opposed to Mars

Yet another amazing coincidence - Mars opposes Mars from the Fifth and I get to play tennis (if that's what you can call it) for the first time ever in Cambridge - me, two grown women, one grown man, one four-year-old and one dog, all leaping around on two tennis courts and having the time of our lives. I remember fun. AND I can still move the next morning.

There's a couple of other significators - Sun in the First, with Jupiter about to follow, and if I pay close attention (and were a really good astrologer) I could use this knowledge to rectify my birth time to the minute, rather than using my mother's "Oh, about a quarter to nine," although that seems uncannily accurate.

All I need to do is notice when I "get arrogant and give myself airs," thereby identifying the exact degree of Taurus on my Ascendant, although something tells me if I am swanning around giving myself airs the last thing I'll be thinking about is staying conscious. It gets complicated, this stuff.

Something's going on, though, as I've already fallen down the front steps trying to get SC down in the stroller when I usually bump it down empty, and yesterday, after a year and a half of using the kitchen, I pinched my finger in the hinge of the corner cabinet as I was closing it. With that same Mars that had me playing tennis coming to square Natal Uranus, I'm told "an accident can be the sign of frustrated ego energies transmuted into destructive powers," but that's only if I'm not aware of the need for constructive change in my life.

As I'll be on the bus again tonight going down to New York to pack up yet more boxes in readiness for leaving somewhere I've lived for forty-nine years, I think it's safe to say I'm aware of the change going on in my life. Whether or not I think it's constructive is another story, so I'd better stay out of the kitchen for a bit.

Sun Trine Midheaven

Quite how you reconcile having a knowledge of and mastery over the necessary material resources for achieving your ends with setting out in a mild drizzle during an east coast spring when you've lived there for 40 years on a mile-long walk with a four-year old in a stroller while wearing light cotton pants and a sweatshirt with standing under a tree in the pouring rain soaked to the skin ten minutes later I'm not quite sure, but then mine's not to reason why, mine's just to take SC to TumblerTots at the gym every Monday.

And Sun on the Ascendant and feeling expansive - being invited out for lunch and choosing corned beef hash and eggs because you know the size of the serving of hash at the place where you're eating covers the whole of the plate.

Uranus Trine Pluto

*Funny* that this will perfect the first weekend in June when I leave my apartment in New York for good and supposedly enter an entirely "new phase of existence in which the habitual patterns and concerns of the old way of my world may vanish entirely or diminish in their importance " - no more having to decide whether I get a slice with pepperoni or sausage, I suppose, or wondering whether I get blackberries or blueberries from the fruit man.


As for the vanishing entirely, my beloved favorite coat of all time - the Wallis Shops full-length grey plaid bias-cut swagger I bought in London in 1989 - got shoved into a Fairway bag and went off to the thrift shop yesterday, leaving the coat closet empty except for the horrible green padded jacket thing I bought in Silver last year for the east coast winter that never happened.


If I wanted to be negative (wot - me?), I could take it as a sign of the end of *cosmopolitan* existence and the beginning of new life in Pumpkin Center, wherever that might turn out to be, but me being such a positive thinker and all that's such a blood-curdling thought I think the first thing I'll do next weekend is take the green thing off to the thrift shop as well and go coatless into the future.


Presumably this aspect is going to pick up the pace a little and get me moving a bit more than it did this weekend. Looking ahead, with Jupiter trining the Midheaven and conjuncting the Ascendant next weekend, all that boundless energy and enthusiasm should at least enable me to get the bundled up magazines on top of the fridge downstairs on Friday night for recycling. 

Mercury Square Pluto

Add this one to Saturn squaring the Midheaven and you get someone supposedly emptying out an apartment wandering backwards and forwards all day through empty bookshelves and cardboard boxes wondering why she's arranging to have what's left after most of her possessions have been thrown out shipped up to New England to go into storage when she has nowhere to live up there instead of being sent directly to the Midwest where she has an already fully furnished house.

THAT'S what you call an obsessive thought that gets in the way of action.

Venus Stationary Retrograde in the First

So Venus is grinding to a halt and we're all thinking about what we truly value and what's important to us and I'm sitting on the bus again coming down to New York and for the first time, me being a bit thick sometimes and all, it hits me that not only am I giving up the apartment I've lived in for 38 years but I'm moving away from the city I came to from London 49 years ago, with not too much chance of being able to move back unless I win the lottery, highly unlikely as I never buy a ticket.


What was it a creative writer instructor said to me once about writing as though I need to get everything I want to say into the very first sentence? What did she know - I didn't say a thing about arriving at what was then Idlewild in my green tweed coat with a real fur collar on a mid-October day with the temperature in the 80s and telling the couple who were sponsoring me that that would be headline news in England. Talk about that was then and this is now.

Uranus Trine Pluto

So for the everyday bit, Mercury conjuncted Venus and when SC woke up from her nap she did NOT immediately say "Can I have a video?" but instead sat on my lap for an hour and we looked at the Peppa Pig book I got her for her birthday. The Sun trined Jupiter and with astonishing forethought and planning I brought SC to Deb's for lunch, rather than standing at the foot of the stairs on Concord waiting for the cleaning crew to mop their way down, and in yet another remarkable coincidence, the Subject Title transit begins just as I book my ticket to take the dreaded five-hour journey down to New York to continue throwing out thirty-eight years' worth of possessions.

"A time of positive evolution in my life," says Astrodienst - when I can "make constructive changes that will make my life worthwhile later on." Certainly not shelling out money month after month for a space I'm never in would be a welcome constructive change, but all I really wanted to do was sublet for two years and then move back in, she said plaintively.

It's all very well to say it's going to lead to a "new and greater understanding of my inner being and how I relate to other people" and make me "more involved with my life, its total meaning to me and how I fit into the universe as a whole," but I have more immediate concerns; how do I get two six foot bookcases and a console table weighing about a hundred pounds down two flights of stairs for trash night tomorrow, and am I really going to part with every book I own?

Mercury Square Midheaven

"Clear Objectives"? What is this, a joke? About the only objective I had yesterday was to watch the Kentucky Derby, a goal I remembered round about nine p.m., two and a half hours after I'll Have Another (and I'd have put money on THAT) evidently surprised the racing world by coming in first.

And why, you may well ask, after the trials and tribulations I went through to not bet on Neptune Collanges in the Grand National, did I not have money on any of the Kentucky runners, now that I've decided my true calling in life is to follow in my father's footsteps and bet on the ponies to give meaning and bring satisfaction to this life in limbo I'm slogging through for another 40 days, not that I'm counting or anything?

For an answer to that, we need to go back to the last line of my Clever Dick post of a few days ago, gloating that I'd put one over on the geniuses at Apple. Ha ha I hadn't, because the next day they called to tell me there was a crack in the plastic of the screen, that damage wasn't covered by AppleCare and that if I wanted it repaired it would cost $446, at which point I had put the phone down.

(My current lack of anything resembling patience, I realize, can be directly attributed to my not taking my prescribed daily dose of a 20g Celexa tablet for coming up to two weeks now and confirms my long-time lurking suspicion that the correct name for the psycho-pharmaceuticals I've been taking since shortly after 9/11 is zombie pills.)

So, having no patience to go into the long involved story of the Apple store calling me back, asking me what I wanted to do, telling me they don't have the parts they need to repair the computer even if that's the way I want to go, me telling them to overnight it back to me so I can take it into an Apple store I can reach by public transport instead of having to ask someone with a car to drive me, them telling me they would do that no charge as a courtesy and then calling back to say the tracking number showed they'd sent it overnight next business day without specifying Saturday delivery and me composing a vitriolic letter in my head to Tim Cook, Kentucky Derby day found me using the old iMac the ceiling fell down on when I used to be a New Yorker with all the online betting site passwords and stuff sitting on the MacBook Air which was in turn sitting in the FedEx sorting facility fifteen miles away waiting to be delivered thirty-six hours later.

Add to the above my finally understanding the meaning of the term "sucker punch" and experiencing it to the max after learning my landlord has accepted my counter-counter-counter-counter offer of a buy-out and as of June 2 I will no longer have an apartment in New York, any readers still reading may perhaps dimly understand my need to distract myself from what passes for reality yesterday afternoon.

Whether anyone will understand why I chose to do so by losing myself completely in a frantic online search for single-wide mobile *homes* and houses made from shipping containers, thus completely forgetting the running of the Kentucky Derby, is another matter, but with Mercury coming to conjunct Mercury in seventeen hours time, I supposedly have a very good chance of getting through to people, so maybe someone will.

Clue: it has something to do with 1674 Redux.

Mercury Conjunct Sun...

... and also the day Saturn squared the Midheaven exactly; not that I obsess or anything, but as the Saturn aspect perfected I was emailing the tax assessor in Grant County telling him I was protesting the value that's been put on the acreage around the Silver house and he was replying telling me he excepted my protest even though I wasn't using the formal method.

I countered (yet another negotiation) by pointing out that as the official document online was a PDF I couldn't meet the two-hours-to-go protest deadline without printing it, filling it in, scanning it and faxing it back, which, without a scanner or fax, was a little difficult - nothing like carefully thought out planning and strategy when beginning to fight City Hall, I always say - and, pulling the ace from my virtual sleeve, which I think is the correct metaphor although as I always have trouble telling the difference between spades and clubs I may be wrong, I also pointed out that one of the helpful staff in his office had told me an email would do the trick just fine, to continue with what may well be an inappropriate figure of speech.

Whatever it was, it worked, and thanks to the urgings of a knowledgeable friend in Silver who knows only too well who he is and who is opening his own can of worms with the Assessor's office, my protest has been duly lodged and acknowledged - the battle of my choice as the Lord of Karma pits himself against what is laughingly known as my public life. And they say there's no free will.

In further developments, exactly an hour after Mercury conjuncted my Sun a somewhat-stunned Me handed over a MacBook Air to a genius at the Apple Store in Chestnut Hill and was told I would probably get it back by Saturday. The good news was no connection seemed to be made between the four-year-old sitting three feet away playing a Sponge Bob Square Pants game on an iPad at the kids' table and the ever-growing splodges of blue ink appearing on the screen of said MacBook Air. They may call them geniuses....

Sun Sextile Mars

So I check messages on the land line yesterday and there's a call from Canada Medicine shop telling me there's a discrepancy on my order. Thinking they're going to tell me they don't have a current prescription when I mailed them one three months ago,  I go through all the Press One Press Two and am ready to tell them as politely as possible just how incompetent I think they are when a human voice tells me my usual order is for one 20 mg. Celexa once a day but the new prescription is for 10 mg. tablets so I will have to take two.

I've been taking two 10 mg. tablets once a day as long as I've been taking Celexa but keep my trap shut and say thank you, I should be able to manage that, just get the fucking order shipped for chrissake, last eight words spoken to self in head.

Next call is to landlord's attorney giving him what I'm sure will be my final counter-offer, saying I'll be out by the first weekend in June and does he have a cardboard box I can borrow.

Then we move on to Citibank to tell them about the three unauthorized charges on my credit card, resulting in yet another new card which supposedly will be arriving for me today. (Note to self: list all automatic monthly payments using old card. Try to change all to new card number before next hacking.)

Now it's the Assessor's Office in Silver to query the valuation of the acreage Bank of America and I own together; eighteen thousand a pop for a load of old rocks, native cacti I can no longer remember the names of because I've been away so long and assorted animal carcasses and skeletons seems a bit steep.

"It's based on the value of the land when you bought the property," I'm told, and I have until five p.m. today to file a dispute, if I so desire. As they seem to think the house itself is worth $54,000 and I'm taxed accordingly, I'm inclined to let that one alone and be thankful for another 500 air miles.

Last on the list of phone calls is Apple, the Irving Thalberg of the NASDAQ. Without mentioning that it all started when Star Child scraped her fingernail over Tinky Winky and Dipsy when they were making Tubby Tustard, I tell them the screen on my MacBook Air looks as though it's leaking blue ink (technical explanation). Mr. Apple Care tells me I'll have to make an appointment to take the patient in for diagnosis, and I tell him as soon as I know where I live I'll do that.

The post above comes to you courtesy of Mercury conjunct the Sun later this afternoon.