1/16/2010

Still love writing out 2010 even though this year is having trouble getting started at least here in our household.
Mars retrograde traveling through Leo roughly opposing everything. the picture i have in mind is all the planets up in Capricorn/Aquarius/Pisces and Mars down in Leo. Definitely stirring up the kids in my life and then stirring up the foundation the home itself.
C's school starts in a week-a wonderful program to get the ones who didn't get through high school back into school and into college. I am so excited for her and worried since the boyfriend will be there and he is VERY disturbed over the break-up. He is gorgeous and very bright-A student until his mid-junior year and then blap everything turns to crap. I asked him what happened and he didn't ever really answer that. I mean this is an A/B student in math and sciences and language and he just quit. I don't know what the problem is/was.
C has found many openings advertised in shop windows. Told her to offer part-time help,steady but no more than 5/6 hours a day. she is a good worker-I have seen her work. I know that the program she is enrolled in offers bus passes and some other forms of financial assistance.
S begins his last semester at State. The cut-backs have really hurt his department-his mentor doesn't even have any classes scheduled although he is teaching at Hayward and another school. He has asked S. to run the resource center which S will gladly. This will look good on the books for graduate school,etc.
Looks like S's mentor is returning to school to get the doctorate needed now to be competitive. S needs the masters or teaching cert.
I am so amazed with S. right now one of his client's is a PhD candidate for medical anthropology who is all pretentious and and rigid in that UC graduate student way and S just smoothly glides along showing her that not only can he edit her work he understands and is not intimidated. I sure remember why I love him so-smart really smart and modest.
This is the week of the devastating earthquake in Haiti. I know devastating is a cliche this week,used over and over but what can one say about a leveling of entire cities killing tens of thousands on one island. Obama has responded accurately, I think but I pray that this is not simply corporations acting with rapidity to get in there and turn Haiti in to one huge factory.
One thing that has crossed my mind as the images are floated through to us than these people starved by the horrible governments who take all the wealth and leave nothing, nothing for those who generate the wealth. At any rate everyone there is so thin, bone thin and this is what the fasionistas want for all of us that we be so thin we appear to be refugees.
Hopefully the world will awaken now to the plight of the Haitians and there will be a change of heart toward them. Well probably not-look at what the money boys continue to pull in Venezuela,Bolivia,Honduras. My last supervisor was born in El Salvador and came here through her church to escape the wars in El Salvador and Hondurus and she told me stories and even gave us a bottle of wine celebrating the 10th anniversary of the success of their refusal to accept fascist rule. She said that one of her brothers was imprisoned in a concentration camp for two years and many family members were killed. They have prospered here-highly educated folk.
This past two years have been hard on her family. Her brilliant daughter was diagnosed with Hodgkins and her husband was laid off by UC-he did some technical work at the weapons lab (yes I get the irony here) and they had just contracted to remodel their kitchen which ended up costing a small fortune due to some destructive elements discovered when walls came down.
S. finally received some pay from the state. Whoopee!! so nice to have canisters full of rice and beans and baskets of onions and citrus and garlic and a bottle of extra virgin olive oil and packages of pasta. today i am making chicken caccitore-smple and very affordable-chicken has been on sale for the first time in months.
Thursday I was in Safeway and encountered the manager and workers in an absolute flurry to get the posted costs increased- some hugely such as moving one item from $2 something to over $3. It seemed to me that everything was just going so high and the tiny manager was so ruffled and so trying to get everything done before all the customers showed up I guess. I was disturbed and I wonder how bad the inflation is going to get. And how long the government can continue saying that there is no inflation.
Mostly I cook vegetarian now with some meat usually ground beef/turkey for S. and B. to eat in tacos or burritos. And I bake bread and treats for everyone but this will stop now since the holiday season is over and none too soon for me. I had a very frightening experience of binge eating again and I don't want to go back down that road. I am so grateful to be grounded in my own physical being so that overeating feels ugly and for me, dangerous. I have gotten here through ,I believe ,gardening, walking, slow cooking, meditation and prayer. This is a return to self after a long dark period. Yesterday I received another screeching diatribe from a woman who was once my best friend. I was so startled and once again so hurt: this cruel woman uses her deep intimate knowledge of me to attack me in her drunken isolation. She has a daughter and a son. The daughter is very successful the son not so much. This woman is convinced that her daughter is successful due only to my ex-friends mothering. She fails to mention how deeply injured her son was in gestation by his mother's alcohol intake nor does she mention how injured he may have been by the years of her drinking and running from the landlords,etc.. I loved her even knowing her shadow as I did because I thought that we shared a Pluto connection-we both have Leo moons with a close Pluto connection and we are both bad news in our own ways. I loved and learned through that relationship to love myself even though in so many ways I am exactly what this world hates in women. She now hates me and uses her knowledge of me drawn from years of intimacy to hurt and wound me. Well that is how she winds up alone,very alone even though she is afraid to admit this. I am not alone and not because my grand daughter is here but because I have friends who seek out my company and love the food I cook and love the conversations in this house.
Well the diatribe was my experience of the eclipse. Well that and S.'s pay from the State finally. weird. Well the "old friend" I was just discussing had the eclipse oppose her Saturn and the retrograde Mars on her Sun then Pluto then Moon in the 7th-ass kicking time if she doesn't watch out( no that is not a threat of physical violence from me just a little heads up that now is the time to be awake and responsible). No time for her to be drinking to the point of blackouts and definitely no time to clean other people's windows.
Well we are off to find the largest bottle of Crystal hot sauce offered. Hoping to find it at Food 4 Less. also looking for a large bottle of PicoPica sauce good ,hot Mexican hot sauce in a bottle-not salsa which I make myself.