Thanks a Latte!

Those who know me know I’m not crazy about my chart. I frequently indulge in a little “chart envy”, wishing it were possible to make a celestial nip/tuck with a placement, or five. I’ve yet to find any value to my Saturn in the 8th House, but with any luck I’ll live long enough to share something profound, or at least learn how to stop bitching about it. Fortunately, I’ve been given a golden ticket or two as well to balance out all the ick –that is, when I can actually see them in action, which I rarely do. How often do we notice when things happen so easily? It’s not uncommon to take the good for granted, and obsess over what’s wrong. These golden ticket are frequently found with what we call the easy aspects between two planets, like the trine. With a trine the connection is smooth and comfortable, creating a natural flow of energy — Think Slip ‘n Slide greased with Crisco. It operates with very little effort from the person gifted with the aspect, so many times they are completely oblivious to their good fortune, because they didn’t do anything to get the goodies. Imagine living a Paris Hilton life – here’s someone who was lucky enough to enjoy luxury and ease as a birth right, not something she earned. Granted, there’s no way to know how she feels about her life, but considering her surroundings, how could she really understand financial hardship or the necessity of work.

Trines are especially enjoyable when they’re between happy planets, like Venus and Jupiter. Everybody likes Venus and Jupiter! They’re what the ancient astrologers called the “Benefics” – Venus being the “lesser benefic” and Jupiter, the “greater benefic”. Venus is associated with money, beauty, things that bring us pleasure – the good stuff. Jupiter is expansive, nicknamed the “Santa Claus planet” for its ebullience, good fortune and generosity. Put the two together and you have a vast potential for piñata dropping bootie. Case in point: I happen to have an exact trine between the two. Now before you go all chart envy on me, let the record show I don’t have a Malibu beach house or a parlor full of gentlemen callers. Sadly. Even with the best of the best, there’s no guarantee life will be full of cash and prizes. But sometimes, if I take the time to notice I can see good fortune sliding to me in all kinds of ways. For example:

•  I find lucky coins on the street all the time. OK, pennies and quarters are not winning lottery tickets, but it happens a lot — so much that my sister ended up buying me a “Lucky Penny Piggy Bank”. It’s a big one. I’ve emptied it three times already.
• I’m really good at finding sweet parking spaces (a necessity in Los Angeles). My friends know this, so whenever we car pool everyone wants me as a passenger in their car to partake of my parking karma. 
• Once I ended up with FREE front row tickets to the one and only Barbara Streisand concert (back then) – they were worth $500. It’s too long a story to explain how I got them, but believe me, they landed in my lap. Since I didn’t really want to go, I gave them to two co-workers who were salivating over them. (And for the record, the clutch on my car had just gone out — $500 to fix — so I totally should have sold them, but it didn’t feel right.)
• Restaurant staff take extra special care of me. When a waitress asked me if there was anything else she could get us, I quipped “Yeah, you can get me an hour in the kitchen with the chef, so he can teach how to make those short ribs…” Well, I didn’t get that, but within minutes he was standing in front of our table where we could rave to him in person. And then later, the waitress delivered a hand written copy of the recipe long before the check arrived. My dinner date, a friend who worked at Bon Appétit, was incredulous – “LeeAnn, it’s Saturday night in the middle of a packed dinner hour and he took the time to write down a recipe for you. That’s huge.” Not as big as a Jupiter/Venus trine, baby!

OK, now I just sound like I’m bragging. I’ll share only one more – promise! Next to our office there’s a gas station / quickie mart. Recently I picked up a habit of heading downstairs for a morning coffee. The thing is, I’m not much the coffee drinker, but I love the instant cappuccino kind that comes out of the machine. (True coffee drinkers would say that is not coffee so much as it is a cup of melted Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream, and they would be right. And it’s goooood.) Anyway, I’ve been hooked on this routine for a few weeks now, until last week when I bounced up to the melted ice cream dispenser to see “Out of Order”. I pouted and whined a little to the guy behind the counter (a very nice Indian man named Ray), who said they were out of “powder” but would get some next week. I checked back every day, hoping it would come in sooner, but it didn’t. More pouting, no whining. Finally one day I went down to buy a real coffee to tide me over, and when I went to pay he said “it’s on the house”. Wha? I stood there a little confused, while he went on about how he felt bad that I came in every day, and they didn’t have it yet, so not only was it on the house that day, but the coffee would be on the house every day until they got the machine working again. Bemused, and a little bewildered, I walked out sipping my steaming hot cup o’ good fortune, and I remembered that sometimes it’s good to be Paris!