Thanksgiving was cool. We schlepped to the high desert as usual to share an excessive feast with my siblings. This year, for the first time ever, we celebrated on Wednesday, Thanksgiving Eve, so my sister and her family could visit her in-laws on Thursday. We weren’t sure how we’d feel about it – Thanksgiving has always been sacred to my sister and me, enshrined in complex, precise, and non-negotiable ritual – but celebrating a day early ended up being completely fine. Other than getting stuck in horrible traffic coming home to San Diego on Thanksgiving Day, the trip was a complete success – nice weather, great food, a complete avoidance of political conversation.
Plus I came back with this little gem, courtesy of my brother. I think I saw Evil Dead back in 1983 or something, against my will (I sang in a band with a bunch of horror movie freaks and they made me sit down and watch it), and actually enjoyed it, but that’s not why I asked to borrow the book. I’m just a sucker for amusing books about the behind-the-scenes world of moviemaking, and Campbell is a pretty funny guy who’s had a singularly strange career. Good fun.
Now that the hideous Santa Ana winds have died down and Thanksgiving is behind us, it finally feels like fall (with only a few weeks to go before the winter solstice). The nippy weather is invigorating, and last night we enjoyed our fireplace for the first time this season. But these shorter days… oy. It’s getting dark by 4:45 pm, and this is San Diego, latitude 33 north; in Scotland it must start getting dark at, what, noon or something? By 7:00 I’m ready to hit the hay. It’s pathetic. My 94-year-old neighbor stays up later than I do.
The skies are changing as well. The Sun has sneaked into cheerful Sagittarius (although it probably has a few surprises in store for us on Monday, when it squares Uranus), and Saturn has gone into retrograde remission for awhile. Mars and Mercury are still retrograde, but not for much longer. The isometric tension of the current transiting fixed-sign configuration (Mars, Saturn, Neptune), which came to a head with the Sun moving through Scorpio, is beginning to feel a little less like a pressure cooker, a little more like a popcorn popper: hot, but effervescent. A bit of a relief, I must say. Enjoy – and be thankful.