Weekend Entertainment Guide 6/7/24

Personal experiences of New Moon and Venus cazimi

One thing I’ve figured out in nearly a year of blogging on Substack is that readers are more interested in reading about themselves than they are in reading about me. Hot on Substack is therefore up top, and my personal experiences of the recent New Moon and Venus cazimi are further down.

Hot on Substack

Dorothy Oja's PlanetWeather

, Guilty as Charged – 34 Counts

Oja examines the chart of the recent jury verdict against Donald Trump, noting the square by sign between Jupiter-Venus-Sun Gemini and Moon-Saturn-Neptune Pisces.

Sun Moon Self

, TRUMP & THE CHALLENGES AHEAD

This post looks at Arabic Parts in the chart of Donald Trump as well as his transits at the April 8 Solar Eclipse.

Michelle Corbesier

, Profections & Solar Returns Workshop

I’m tempted — like I said last post, I have to nail down solar returns if I’m going to go into consulting astrology. I may sign up depending on how some family schedule stuff shakes out.

Sunday Postcards

, In the fold of the motherland

This post about growing up in the United States with Russian immigrant parents and then finally visiting Russia as an adult was really sweet and thoughtful.

Martha Fearnley

, Astro Weather #29: June 3 - 9, 2024

There is, as the meme goes, a direct connection between the events of 9/11 and the existence of the movie Fifty Shades of Grey. The legend is this: witnessing the towers fall spurred Gerard Way into finally taking his dream of making music seriously, My Chemical Romance inspired Stephanie Meyer in her writing of Twilight, of which Fifty Shades was a work of fan fiction in its original form. This piece of cultural lore as told in meme usually manifests as a presentation of two to four of the above elements with the story omitted but the connection implied, which either prompts in the viewer a fleeting sense of superiority or sends them off to google ‘9/11 fifty shades’. (Actually, there’s another version of this meme that connects 9/11 with the demise of The Ellen Show and I’ll let you do the deciphering yourself on that one).

I hadn’t heard of any of this, but what a great reminder that our individual decisions ripple outward in surprising ways.

Review of yesterday's New Moon

What a weird day! There was some difficult energy floating around, as predicted in my previous post, but the Gemini stellium square Saturn also wound up manifesting in the resolution of some long-running practical issues — the persistent quality of Saturn was actually good for that. I have Libra Rising, so Saturn is currently transiting my 6th house, which may be relevant.

The good: resolution of long-running practical issues

Uber credit card scam

In early February 2024, I got a fraudulent Uber charge on my credit card. I reported it to my bank, and they sent me a new credit card. I’d been through that process with non-Uber fraudulent charges in the past, so I knew the drill. I got another fraudulent Uber charge in early March, so I reported it to my bank and again got a new credit card.

In early April, though, I got a third fraudulent Uber charge. I realized someone was probably using my credit card for their Uber subscription. With the credit card replacements in February and March, I noticed that some of my wanted and chosen subscriptions caught on to the change automatically without me having to provide the new credit card number. That’s a great convenience for a subscription that’s legitimate — and really bad for a subscription that’s not legitimate.

I didn’t want to get yet another credit card from my bank and keep repeating the process every month. I was also busy with other things, so I just let the whole situation sit. Sure enough, I got another fraudulent Uber charge in early May.

I eventually reached out to Uber to try to resolve the situation from their end. Though I still have a little bit of mop-up work to do, I finally saw refunds from Uber pending in my bank account yesterday. I am not sure if this is a common scam going around these days, but if I had to do it over again, I would have reported it to Uber sooner rather than repeatedly going through my bank. The form to report this sort of problem to Uber is here: https://help.uber.com/en/riders/article/my-account-has-an-unrecognized-charge?nodeId=fe547761-4384-42d4-8531-4cfb0e0e523e

Car repair

In January 2023, when Mercury was stationing at the end of a retrograde in Capricorn, I had my car’s EVAP system repaired. Transiting Mars in Gemini was no longer retrograde, but it was squaring my car’s Mars in Pisces. I had to go back for repairs to that repair multiple times throughout 2023. Anyway, there was one more update to it yesterday, still under warranty from the original January 2023 repair, and hopefully that finally settles it. The EVAP system of a car has to do with capturing gasoline fumes and routing them to the appropriate place, so dealing with that under prominent Gemini placements, both yesterday and in January 2023, makes a lot of sense.

The bad: weird incident at Starbucks

I love working from home in general and never want to go back to the kind of office work I did in the past, but sometimes it is nice to have an excuse to get out of the house. I’ve been patient with all my recent car repairs because there’s a Starbucks very close to my mechanic in west Eugene, and I can just go to Starbucks and work on horoscopes or whatever else there while I wait for my car.

Yesterday, though, a man and a woman (who referred to the man as her husband) got in a huge fight with each other in and around the Starbucks — they repeatedly chased each other in and out of the Starbucks. They also argued loudly with Starbucks employees, who called the police. Based on all the belongings they were carting around, they may have been homeless. The woman threw her drink all over the inside window of the Starbucks.

In roughly 20 years of regularly visiting coffee shops, I’d never seen anything like that before. I didn’t think there was anything I could do to make the situation better, so I just tried to keep quiet and stay out of it. I think that neighborhood has gotten rougher over the past few years — as has the city in general. Anyway, the dramatic incident makes sense for the Sun, the Moon, and Venus all square Saturn, in terms of Saturn having the potential to drive people’s frustrations to a breaking point.

More on Venus Cazimi

The Venus cycle has been one of the weaker points of my astrological knowledge, but there was a lot of talk about it related to the Venus Retrograde in Leo during summer 2023. As described in a previous post, Demetra George connected it to the movie Barbie on an episode of The Astrology Podcast.

What a time for me to learn — retrograde Venus conjoined the Sun at 20° Leo on August 13, 2023, right after my birthday on August 12. Uranus at 22° Taurus squared the Venus-Sun conjunction, and Saturn was then at 4° Pisces.

Natally, I have the Sun at 19° Leo square the Moon at 14° Scorpio. Though the transiting square between Saturn in Aquarius and Uranus in Taurus was only exact at three hits in 2021, it dragged out for me from then into early 2024 — Saturn squared my Moon and opposed my Sun, and Uranus opposed my Moon and squared my Sun. One major thing that happened for me under these tense aspects was the publication of Booby Prize: An Astrological Novel on December 31, 2022.

The August 2023 Venus-Sun conjunction therefore got me all stirred up regarding issues related to the publication of Booby Prize. That’s what the weird Substack post I made about acupuncture back then was referring to. If anyone not involved with the publication of Booby Prize suspects that the weird acupuncture post was about them, it wasn’t. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between Scorpio Moon intuition and Scorpio Moon paranoia, but I feel like I need to put that out there now.

How I would say the Venus-Sun conjunction made the Saturn-Uranus problems worse: Saturn and Uranus can both be very rigid and uncompromising. They are objectively right, no matter how you feel about it. Venus, however, wants everyone to feel good immediately about whatever Saturn and Uranus are forcefully pressuring them to do, and that just adds insult to injury. Sometimes it is genuinely necessary for people to make changes that weren’t their idea, but expecting them to be ebulliently happy about it right away is not realistic. The more you let them have their honest feelings, the sooner those feelings are likely to pass.

Since the August 2023 Venus-Sun conjunction fell in my 11th house, which is associated with both technology and community, my major task has been learning how to use Substack. I have been through a fair amount of trial and error in figuring out what kind of content readers find valuable. Now that Venus has conjoined the Sun again on June 4, 2024, this time moving direct, I feel like I have a Substack workflow that I know how to maintain going forward. I appreciate all of the subscribers who are with me now!