Venus Square Chiron...

... and then trine itself the next day.

So on Monday - the day I got the out-of-the-blue call about is one o'clock good for the dump run - I'd been going to go myself and also run errands: go to the post office to pick up a package and send their Christmas present to my great-neices in England, and go to B of A and have them fax the latest round of duplicated documentation needed for the refinance.

My initial protestations about needing my own car because I had errands to run were swept away with "No worries - I'm retired and I'll be your chauffeur for the afternoon," a statement he would have had cause to regret had I not, with great forethought, having learned from bitter experience, already put a New Yorker magazine in my bag to occupy myself while I waited for customer service at B of A. This I handed over to him as he waited in the truck in the parking lot at the Post Office, and I disappeared inside with the prophetic words "This might take a while. I'm sending something to England."

(For the *reasoning* behind this utterance, see my previous attempt at doing this.)

So there I am at the post office counter with my present (Venus) to send to the girls, and there is the post office man behind the counter attempting to use the newly installed that morning software for international shipping, and Chiron (Pain? Aggravation? Am I really pushing it here?) just isn't letting it happen. The process seemed to involve a touch screen, but as the post office man pointed out to me, that feature didn't seem to work and there was no other way to enter the customs information.

Another p.o. man was called over who agreed with my man that the software was a piece of cr*p, and told him in detail about the two attempts he'd made that day to get the program to work, "attempts" being the operative word. I looked at the line of people snaking out the door because of my 15 minutes at the counter, thought of my chauffeur, probably about to turn to the cartoon contest on the back page, thought of how I now couldn't possibly ask him to stop at the bank so would have to come down the hill again on Tuesday anyway, and suggested, to the visible relief of the poor soul still futilely stabbing at the screen, that we give it up for the day and try again on the next.

And on the next, with Venus now trine Venus, I waltzed into the post office, was able to go directly to the man from the day before who gave me a big smile, told me the software was fixed and dispatched the package to the twins in - well, in a lot less time than the unsuccessful efforts of the day before had taken. And I didn't have to wait at the bank.