Mercury Square Uranus

OK, to hell with finishing "A Cautionary Tale" - it's only eight o'clock and I've already lost my temper twice, which I'll be the first to admit probably has more to do with my not having taken Celexa for a month than with Mercury squaring Uranus later today, but still -

Let's calm down a minute here and start at the beginning. Wake up, get up, let cat out, make coffee, let cat in (27 degrees out there), take coffee back to bed, read email.

Message from Citibank Customer Service" "Good News! Credit has posted to your account!"

We are pleased to inform you that credit(s) have been issued to your account for the disputed fraud charge(s), including any related fees and interest charges. At this time, no further action is required by you. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you. Sincerely, Your Customer Service Team

Disputed fraud charges? What disputed fraud charges? Is this the riding stables in the midwest that Citibank called me about two weeks ago after I ordered the boots from Denmark?  They knew then the charge was fraudulent - didn't they take it off right away?

Go to Citibank website, log in, go to credit card account, click on it, get a message telling me to enter my authorization code. Authorization code? I just logged in with user name and password. What authorization code? Oh, I see, if I don't have one click this little box and Citibank will auto-call me and give me one. Click the little box, am taken straight to a screen giving me the place to enter the code, get out of bed (29 degrees) and bring phone back but nothing happens.

Do it again. No phone call. "If you're having trouble with this process call us at 800 whatever it is," it says on screen,"and choose Option 0," and silly enough to think calling that number will immediately allow me to choose Option 0, I call. RoboVoice welcomes me to Citibank and asks for my card number. I am not yet so afraid of being hacked again I sleep with my credit card under my pillow. My credit card is in my wallet in my handbag. In another room. I leave my flannel sheets, get my credit card (32 degrees) and come back to bed.

I call Citibank again. I tell it my credit card number. I tell it my secret word. I tell it the last four digits of my Social Security number. I get a person who is far, far away from Silver City who asks me for my credit card number, my secret word, the last four digits of my Social Security number and my name exactly as it appears on my card. I tell her all of those things and a bit more and she tells me she understands my frustration and thanks me for being a valued Citibank customer for nine years.

I have been a valued Citibank customer for fifty years so help me God and in my storage locker in Randolph I have a photograph of me drinking a complementary cup of coffee at the 1963 opening of the Citibank branch on 79th and First in Manhattan to prove it, and now it is time to go and play tennis and I have just realized I washed my tennis clothes last night and didn't dry them so I have to find something else to wear, so just like "A Cautionary Tale", this will have to be continued.

A Cautionary Tale - Big Ticket Items and Mercury Retrograde

OK, so it wasn't a car or a house or a 60 inch flat screen TV but it's been a long time since I shelled out $200 on a pair of shoes - boots, to be exact, and ankle boots, to be exacter - absolutely plain flat white leather lace-ups, brought to my attention nine days after Mercury went retrograde courtesy of a presumably targeted fab ad (the name of the company, not my description of the ad) appearing on the front page of the New York Times (look it up yourself), although how fab know I once had a similar pair made by ecco that I wore for ten years until they dropped off my feet and have been searching for ever since I have no idea. (Well, I know how they know about the searching part. I haven't posted this yet and I'm already getting ads for ecco showing up all over the place. Thank you Larry and Sergey.)

Anyway, there were these white leather high-tops on my computer screen and I immediately emailed fab to find out if they had my size. I got a very chatty email back all about those are really cool boots, aren't they, and I'd like to have a pair myself etc. etc. but sorry, they didn't, which of course led to me ten seconds later groping my way through Shoe the Bear's all-over-the-place front page to get to the bit where they sell shoes and outlining my right foot on a piece of paper with a magic marker.

Correct shoe size determined and initial frenzy of boot discovery over, I was a little taken aback when I realized that because I was now in Denmark the 110.00 price I'd been quite prepared to pay was in euros and not dollars, but with my birthday coming up next month it took about as long as it took my favorite currency converter to tell me the boots were $148 for me to remember I've just refinanced so have more disposable income (hah!)  and anyway it's only money.

The page where you plugged in the credit card number and shipping address did look a little simple compared to U.S.A sites like Amazon and PayPal, but when you're a cosmopolitan person like me you expect to come across these little differences when you travel, it's all part of the experience for goodness sake, and so what if the shipping method - described as simply "shipment" on the acknowledgment - cost $58.39? It's my birthday next month and I'm loaded.

And so what if I got a call from Citibank's Early Warning Fraud Alert the next day asking me if I'd paid some riding stables somewhere in the midwest $49? As it's about the fourth time in two years that I've been hacked, the CEWFA lady was trying so hard to persuade me to get yet another new card rather than risk more fraudulent charges she offered to call all the companies whose bills I have on auto-pay for me and give them my new card number to save me the trouble! Boy, I thought, this order for my new boots is working out really well.

A couple of days go by and in my email I get what I can only think is a shipping notice. I already know Shoe the Bear is a new (and optimistic) company - my order number is 10000434 - and now I realize they're also very sensible and don't want to waste too much money on documentation and silly old forms. Apart from the date - March 6 instead of March 4 - the new missive is exactly the same as the original cheery acknowledgment (the wording of which had seemed a little strange at the time but I was excited) -

Hello, Pamela Reeves
The waiting has come to an end! Today your shoes will be packed and shipped. You'll be ready to rock them within a few days. If you're satisfied with our product, and want to track down the whereabouts of the Bear, drop in on our Facebook page!

 - and the shipping method is exactly the same - "shipment." How amusing! Those funny Danish people don't want me to be able to track my shipment, they want me to track down them. It sure is different over there.

And as this cautionary tale is very long, I think it best to post it in two parts, so with apologies for leaving you in suspense, I shall now go and see how much money I've lost today on DDD.

Jupiter conjunct Uranus, Continued

end of yesterday's post:

.......but maybe after that I'll drag myself down to the mailbox and see what's waiting for me there. There ought to be something after three days.

Well, I didn't but there was. I made it down to the mailbox today and there was my little windfall - my refund check for $195 the home insurance company had to send me because the mortgage agent from Bank of America didn't tell me till the night before the closing of my refinance that I'd have to pay a year's insurance up front and I had just sent a payment of $200 to the insurance co.

So it wasn't a sudden windfall: I'd known for a couple of weeks it would be coming. Still, I like that it arrived when it did and it will come in handy when I take myself off to Walmart to pick up a couple of microwaves.

Jupiter Conjunct Uranus

Oh that funny old universe - such a sense of humor it has. First pass of this, at the end of July last year, I was in Vegas all ready for my sudden windfall and all that happened in the "unexpected" department was we had no wifi in our room.

Today, as I'm waiting to hear I've won first place in the international playwriting competition I entered last summer or at the very least to get $10 from the woman I lent $5,000 to three years ago on the sworn promise it would be paid back within a month, I decide to have a chicken pot pie for lunch (hey, I'm sick), set the microwave on timer for 59 minutes and ten minutes after that it promptly blows itself up. 

Obviously the solar system knows I have to go to Walmart to buy one new microwave for my B&B and figures I may as well pick up two while I'm there.

But wait, there's more! Unable to remember what happened on the second pass of Jupiter to Uranus, I plugged in poor old everyday-astrology to find out and was directed to this - my writing, for sure, but in a template I never used or chose, only one year archived when there *should* be five, no profile, no nothing - cue Twilight Zone music.

A more specific search did bring up this and this, both in the *correct* template, so I dunno. Right now my chicken pot pie is ready and then it's time for my stopping-celexa-cold turkey afternoon nap, but maybe after that I'll drag myself down to the mailbox and see what's waiting for me there. There ought to be something after three days.

Sun and Then Venus on Part of Fortune

So on Saturday the Sun was sitting on my Part of Fortune - 26 degrees Pisces in the Twelfth - and yesterday, two days later, Venus hit the same place.

I've said this on here before but with a Part of Fortune at the placement given it's not as though I expect to win the pools or anything and I've yet to be proven wrong ha ha.

So: on Saturday I played what we call Australian Doubles with two friends, went to Ace Hardware and bought a coil of wire (don't ask) and a four pack each of Dianthus and Pansies, went to Walmart where I finally at last found and bought a sun shield thing for the car and groceries for the week and then came home and spent the rest of the day piddling around outside exulting in being able to get a head start on *gardening*.

Today D and I gave tennis a pass (just a bit too parky) and went to pick up a corner unit I'd bought sight unseen from an antique dealer downtown who's handling an estate sale not yet open to the public. For three blissful hours the two of us picked through an Aladdin's Cave (read garage and basement) crammed to the rafters, if you could have rafters in a basement, with three generations' worth of assorted household accumulati, to coin a phrase.

I ended up with my corner unit (wood, six shelves, taller than me), a small rectangular wooden table with a scalloped top complete with unchipped glass to match, a tiny three tier table, a magazine rack, a rather Martha-ish wrought iron plant hanger in the shape of a cat, a turquoise ceramic planter, assorted plastic greenery and flowers, twelve real dried bulrushes, two large raffia flowers, a big bag of gold-painted Christmas tree balls (there is method involving deer deterrent to the madness of the last four items, photos to follow when project completed), a pretty quilt for Little Walnut B&B, four *adorable* cotton dresses size 2T, one pair of tights 2T, two pristine ice-skating outfits 4-5T, two pairs of denim shorts 5T, one pair velvet pants 6T, one denim skirt 6T, two photo frames, one with 60-year-old photo inside which can't be described as it's a birthday present for someone who might read this and a very fetching cotton pinny with a pocket in the shape of a chicken: total cost, sixty-four dollars.

And on hold until tomorrow when I go in and pay for them because I didn't take my checkbook: six sheets (?) corrugated tin, five dollars the lot, six more-than-two-feet in diameter tree trunks, perfect height for seating, two dollars each, and a 1930's style phone table with attached seat, needs work, ten dollars.

Saturn Trine Mars

I'm glad this is giving me something other than the ability to stick with a knitting pattern more complicated than anything I've ever attempted - as it perfected, on Saturday night, I was hunched over my beloved MacBook Air with my tongue sticking out of the corner of my mouth listing the addition on Airbnb (yet more shameless promotion).

It must have taken me a couple of hours to get the listing up. I had to check on both computers for photos (how I struggle on with life I sometimes do not know), email them to myself (I've given up on Dropbox because it took over all my iPhoto settings), get them imported, captioned and re-arranged, write the description of the room, describe the neighborhood, set the nightly price, monthly rate, come up with a price for extra people, figure out the calendar - NOT a piece of cake with natal Saturn in three, as anyone with the same placement will understand.

And even more shameless promotion: mention this blog when you book and the place is yours for $64.99.

Venus Opposed to Jupiter

This turned out to be one of those don't even bother to look at your horoscope because you're living it out anyway.

Now that the weather's warmer tennis time keeps getting earlier and earlier, giving me less time than I've become used to to read the Daily Mail, see how much Apple has gone down, play a move of Lexulous with B and check the day's aspects, so once D had won all three of our sets, as usual, my guard was completely down when we decided to tag a visit to Antique Mall on to the end of our ritual once-a-week thrift shop crawl.

Ten minutes later, my new credit card was being swiped and I'd become the happy owner of two handsome treated-for-the-outside wicker chairs - one in great condition for $125 and its poor relation, unravelling a bit near its feet but still in good shape and sturdy for $50 (special price down from $75 as I was buying its partner) - and was telling the mall owner I'd measure Zippy's hatchback and see if I could get them home myself.

Once I did get home and had a look at astrodienst to see what I could expect for the day there was nothing to do but laugh, especially as I'd been congratulating myself on getting out of PAWS without spending any money.

At least even I can't eat furniture.