2007 May : Big Sky AstroBlog

May

30

No Gemini/Sagittarius full moon would be complete with a travelogue, right?

We spent the long holiday weekend making a pilgrimage to San Francisco, and everything was wonderful… the two daylong drives through surprisingly light traffic, the hotel, the meals, the visits with friends and family. Perfection. Even the cats had a good time, since our neighbor visited them twice a day in our absence, lavishing them with fresh catnip and proving much more attentive to playtime than Bodhi and Spike’s slackass parents.

Mostly, we did what people do when they visit San Francisco: we ate, we drank, and we hiked up and down hills until our calves seized up. It was cold and damp and cloudy, so coffee - always a passion of ours - assumed vital importance. If you find yourself in the city and want a really outstanding cup of coffee, consider a pilgrimage to Ritual Coffee Roasters in the Mission District. An oasis tucked into a nondescript storefront on a very funky stretch of Valencia, Ritual serves one of the best cups of french press coffee I’ve ever tasted in a cafÃ©, and their service is stellar. Don’t miss the fresh gingerbread.

San Francisco is a sophisticated city, but now and then it will remind you that it’s essentially Ground Zero for crazy. One night, waiting for a table outside a North Beach restaurant, I was approached by an enthusiastic street busker who assaulted me with a zesty accapella rendition of “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”. He finished his number, asked me for a quarter, and then berated me for “only” giving him two. “Ain’t too proud to beg,” indeed.

Luckily, we’d fortified ourselves with an innoculation of crazy in a brief detour through Santa Cruz on the way up the coast. I was reminded why I loved living there for 15 months back in 1994/95, but also why I was really happy to return to San Diego. It takes some doing for a city to make me feel conservative, but Santa Cruz somehow manages. It is charming, but kind of a freak show - even though the main shopping drag has been strenuously gentrified since our last visit, complete with The Gap, Starbucks, and Borders stores. Thankfully, the noncorporate standbys - the funky boutiques, Santa Cruz Coffee, and Bookshop Santa Cruz - are still going strong. And the once pervasive panhandlers seem to have been replaced with street musicians, which makes the experience of strolling down Pacific Avenue a lot less stressful. Unless you hate Grateful Dead songs.

When we lived there we rented a little bungalow just a couple of blocks off Highway 1, and driving into town along that familiar route made my heart constrict with nostalgia. I don’t know about you, but when I feel homesick for a place it’s usually less because of the places where I lived and ate and shopped there, or even for the people I knew; it’s really because I’m homesick for the person I used to be when I lived there, and the circumstances of my life. The Santa Cruz era was a strange one for me, nearly filling the short span of time between my brother’s death and my mother’s. It represents the beginning of the remarkably challenging Pluto in Sagittarius period of my life, when everything began to change and just kept on changing for years. Driving past our old haunts in these final days of Pluto’s voyage through Sagittarius felt fitting, if a bit sad.

* * *

In another Sagittarius/Jupiterian vein there is news, kind of, about my book. The publisher sent a mockup of the proposed cover art. These are nice people, mind you, who certainly know their business and surely want my book to succeed; but suffice to say this artwork was not to my liking. At all. It took me, in fact, to a very dark place. I spent a few days collecting my wits, then wrote a polite letter, tactfully expressing my grave concerns. Mind you, it took numerous revisions to excise certain unflattering - and almost certainly unhelpful - turns of phrase. Sigh. Hold good thoughts for me!

May 30, 2007 | 2 Comments

May

30

The Full Moon in Sagittarius is exact tomorrow evening at 6:04 pm PDT. My full moon essay, “The Last Word,” has been posted at my website:

The Last Word
For too long, the voice of “we, the people” â€“ in media, in politics, and in public discourse - has been shrill, closed-minded, and downright mean. Itâ€™s only since Jupiter entered Sagittarius last November, for the first time since Pluto has occupied that sign, that we have begun to reclaim the positive power of our collective voice. Jupiter has opened the window and reintroduced light into our Pluto in Sagittarius dungeon, beginning to clear the fouled air while Pluto prepares to move into Capricorn in January….
(go to article)

May 30, 2007 | 8 Comments

May

21

The Sun entered clever Gemini this morning at 3:12 am PDT, but I don’t feel any smarter yet. How about you?

The last couple of weeks have been all about fixing things around here. When the transiting Sun squared Saturn (May 9), my back went out - as per usual for me under Sun/Saturn squares. And before you “Secret” people try telling me I’m manifesting this, I just have to say that I’m almost never on top of current aspects enough to be setting myself up with negative thinking. Most of my astrology work at the moment is electional, which means I can run down the major transits for 2008 off the top of my head but don’t have clue one about what’s happening this week. Anyway, it took a tedious three or four days of yoga and soft chairs before I could spend much time at the computer. Stupid back.

This wouldn’t have been so bad - I could have worked from the sofa - except, of course, my laptop recently met with catastrophic misadventure. HP finally sent a special box and shipping label last week and I packed up my smouldering laptop and sent it off for repair. I was shocked and thrilled when it returned within just a few days, fully functional - though of course they replaced the hard drive and I lost everything on it; no biggie, all my data was backed up. Kind of a hassle restoring all the applications, though. Still, I’m reasonably satisfied with how the whole situation was ultimately resolved, though I still think I had to jump through a few more hoops than was strictly necessary to get HP to step up and fix the problem. A two-year-old computer should not smoke, right? It’s bad for its health.

In other repair news, Jonny finally finished off the floor of the garage, filling the gaping hole that was left after last year’s repair of the listing wall. Soon we can move everything back into the garage, which means we’ll no longer have a patio, driveway, and backyard that are overflowing with garage flotsam. It will mean relinquishing the coveted title of Trashiest Neighbors on the Block, but so be it.

Now our car is with our mechanic, enjoying a few rejuvenating spa days before we take off for a mini-vacation to San Francisco. The purpose of our visit (other than the fact that SF is my husband’s favorite city in the world) is to celebrate our 14th wedding anniversary - a half a Saturn cycle! - with our good friend (best man at our wedding) and his partner. Fourteen years sounds like a semi-impressive amount of time, but truthfully, it’s hard to remember a time when we weren’t married.

And I mean that in a good way.

May 21, 2007 | 4 Comments

May

9

Getting my computer problem fixed wasn’t quite as easy as Peter made it sound, of course. First I had to go another round with The Gatekeepers: a different agent and his supervisor, who were determined to shift the blame for my laptop’s spectacular demise to me. I stood my ground, and I don’t know what it was (My polite but firm manner? My subtle hint that smouldering computers had proven to be something of a legal liability for some of their competitors?), but the next day a representative phoned and confirmed that the laptop would be fixed at no charge. Triumphant in victory, I resisted the impulse to retort, “You’re damn right it will!” Somehow, I felt it would be… unsportsmanlike.

Sadly, no amount of haggling with customer service representatives can fix things for my neighbor, a dear friend who, I learned today, is quickly dying. It’s not completely unexpected - she’s in her 90s - but she’s defied the odds so many times over the past few years that it’s a hard to believe she’s leaving us. With all the female elders of my family pretty much gone, I’ve grown especially attached to her in recent years, and she’ll be sorely missed. There’s some guilt, too, that I’ve indulged myself in preoccupation over trivial things in recent weeks and haven’t gotten over for a visit, so I didn’t know her cancer had returned with a vengeance. But of course, that’s much more my loss than hers; she has been surrounded by her loved ones, thank goodness, while I’ve been foolishly missing out on her wisdom, spunk, and inspiring attitude.

That’s it. I haven’t any grand philosophical statements about it; I’m just sad, is all. Transiting Venus in Cancer returned to its position in my birth chart today, and all afternoon I’ve been reminded of a rather poignant episode of Sex and the City called “My Motherboard, My Self.” In that episode two very different storylines - the death of Carrie’s computer (and what it taught her about her need for independence) and the death of Miranda’s mother - illustrated a common (and rather Cancerian) theme: the difficulty of close relationships, of relying on people, because when you do, it hurts to lose them.

It’s a sad reality that even the best, most enduring relationships have the same punchline: in the end, someone is going to leave - by dying, if nothing else - and someone is going to get left. Those are the rules of engagement, right? But I suppose it doesn’t prevent us irrationally hoping that somehow, we’ll be the ones who figure out how to beat the system.

May 9, 2007 | 8 Comments

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Sign of Leo

Moon sextiles Mercury at
4:20 pm on Jul.5, 2008

Moon opposes Neptune at
5:22 pm on Jul.5, 2008

Moon trines Pluto at
3:05 am on Jul.6, 2008

Moon goes void of course at
3:05 am on Jul.6, 2008

Moon enters Virgo at
4:04 am on Jul.6, 2008

Moon conjuncts Mars at
9:19 am on Jul.6, 2008