Waiting, waiting. Kristen and Marcus are off tomorrow to visit my namesake on Maui for a couple of weeks. What time I will mostly spend house-sitting for Kristen. Annie will be looking after Marcus's cats. Meantime, I'm going to be getting my flu shots, seeing about getting my teeth checked, preparaing for the final and last hegirah--I calculate that I've got about a month (before the borders clang shut and Bush's domestic reign of terror goes into high gear--He, and the paramilitary agencies into which he has poured trillions, can't step back from it). Even now, reason tells me, it may be too late. So I try to visualize myself celebrating Beethoven's birthday in Paris, looking ahead to spring in the Bois de Boulogne, jours de grandes eaux at Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte, attending lectures at the Sorbonne, preparing for a Master's in Old French and Medieval Latin. Vedremo.

Sunshine! Gloria called me from work today wanting to know what Mercury's aspects were for this day, could I google it. So! A transit of the sun beginning about now; retrogression, from the end of October through the 17th of this month; major conjunctions and re-conjunctions with the Sun, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, all of which are in Scorpio: As an interpretive astrologer I'd predict that successful Democratic candidates are going to be assassinated, at the very least. But who of course knows?

Somehow I've been losing blogs; the last two or three or four simply haven't been "published." Talked with Phil for a long while Sunday (yesterday) morning. He's just seen Lohengrin done at the Koeln Staatsoper, which moved him to Modest/Piotr Tschaikovsky-like lacrimal effusions, the beauty thereof overwhelming him. He keeps saying, "They're not after you, Anatole, you old hippy," thereby missing several points, the major one being that they're after all of us, or, rather, a good number of any of us. Depressing, hard to argue--especially beacuse, in a way, I don't really want him to grasp the full horror of what "they," the Negropontes, Kissingers, Dan Mitreones, are all about. I just keep saying "Google Operation Condor," and Phil keeps never doing it.