Jeff's Journey 1111: May 2021

The Queen of Wands was the Card for April in my New Year reading and it's time to see how she influenced me.

Or, how I used her.

Wands is the suit of our ambition, drive, passion and creativity. It’s connected to fire energy which gives us the steam to push ahead with our goals, our dreams, our ambitions.

Rider Waite Smith Tarot

In the traditional card, we see a red headed woman seated on a throne. Yet, she is not seated in a manner befitting a queen, with her knees and ankles together. Her pose suggests she is ready to jump into action to pursue her ambitions. She is dressed in a yellow tunic, holding a sunflower in her left hand and a wand in her right. Three sunflowers also adorn the tapestry behind her throne. There are two orange lions rampant between the sunflowers. Yellow and orange are the colors of the sun and fire suggesting the heat and passion of the suit as well as fire energy.

In the Grimalkin deck, by MJ Cullinane, we see a beautiful orange colored cat standing on a throne, gazing fixedly off into the distance as is the queen in the traditional card. She obviously spies something. We also see a bright sun and a few sunflowers as well as a couple of flames reminding us of the energies of the suit.

The Grimalkin Tarot,
(C) 2020, MJ Cullinane

With all this passion and fire energy, the Queen of Wands is one passionate woman. She is a woman driven to succeed. Nothing, or no one, stands in her way when she sets her mind to achieve something. She is adventurous, bold and daring.

This past month was a most lackluster month. The lethargy that overcame me was so heavy, it was all I could do to take my walks in the mornings. I think I’d fallen into a pandemic depression. I kept waiting for the Queen of Wands to show up, for some creative spark, some passion to drive me forward. But, I could not find her. I did decide to get my first vaccination and took the closest appointment location near me, but I don’t think it was the Queen’s energy that pushed me into making the decision.

But, I did finally decide to do something I’d been contemplating for years; begin some major home projects. So, I strolled, masked and sanitized, into Home Depot to begin the process of new flooring for my upstairs rooms and some new countertops in the kitchen and three bathrooms. The carpeting was still the original from when I bought the house in 2003 and had seen some much better days. I wasn’t ready to tackle a complete kitchen remodel but was definitely in need of some new countertops which were also the original white tile but now with some cracks and broken tiles in the kitchen. The appliances were in decent shape and I believe if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Unless, it’s time to sell the house.

The salespersons in each department were very helpful, patient with all my questions and quite knowledgeable of their products and procedures. I was going to start with the flooring and then move to the countertops after. I set up the appointment for the flooring measurements and was given a worksheet to sketch my counters and get my preliminary measurements for the estimate. Upon returning to the store with the countertop measurements, one of the granite patterns I wanted was on sale, but only for the next week. Needless to say, I decided to reverse my plan and the flooring would wait.

The process was seamless and went without a hitch. Someone came out to take the official measurements and sketch the plan. He suggested that I should have new sinks on hand in case the existing ones were damaged upon removal. So, I traipsed back to Home Depot and selected five sinks. I found my way to the stone works store to select the actual slabs that would become my new countertops. Now to wait for the installation.

The receptionist in the main office of the installers tried to tell me it would be a one day job, but I didn’t believe her. I mean, one kitchen, and three bathrooms in one day? Puhleeease. I knew it would be two and then one more day for the plumbers to show up and reconnect my new sinks. The crews, both the installers and plumbers, were dedicated workers and did excellent work. The old countertops were demolished and the new ones were installed in two days and the plumbers showed up the next day and connected all five sinks within about three hours.

With the flooring, which is almost ready to go, I ran into some more challenges. I now know what a stair nose is. I had planned to put laminate in the upstairs rooms (4 bedrooms and their closets, two bathrooms, and a linen closet) but to carpet the stairs to eliminate possible slippage. Well, as I was putting laminate on the top landing, it needed a stair nose to finish the connection between the riser and the landing. It seemed every color of laminate I was considering did not have the matching stair nose. I’d take a few samples home, find one I liked, go back to the store and have the salesperson make the adjustment in the preliminary quote. We’d make the call to pay for it, only to discover, it had no matching stair nose. The salesperson suggested I could buy a very plain stair nose and try to find a matching, or comparable, stain. Somehow, that sounded easier than I felt it would be. After my third or fourth try and by now I even knew how to search for stair noses, I thought I’d found the one only to find out that by the time I went in to make the purchase, there were no more matching stair noses. But, I took it all in stride. What more could I do?

A Stair Nose

I then figured it out, I was going about this the wrong way. I looked for available stair noses, then would go back to the store and get the samples that appealed to me. Lo and behold, the eighth time was the charm. As of this writing, the materials are being ordered, I’m packing everything in my upstairs (alone, because of COVID restrictions and all my friends are back at work anyway) and am aiming for an end of May deadline which is not fixed in granite.

I guess the Queen’s energy was what I needed to light my fire to get these projects going, to kick my ambition into gear. I’m ecstatic with how the counters turned out. I still have some work to do in the bathrooms; prep the walls for painting, deciding on the colors, shopping for new mirrors and then hanging them. Maybe the Queen's energy was there all along waiting for me to seize it. Carpe Regina!

I learned a lot about myself in this process. I can only control my reaction to situations that don’t go according to plan. And quite a lot didn’t go to plan. I had wanted a different color of granite than what I ended up with, but it was no longer available and hadn’t been for quite some time. I am quite happy with what I did end up with. I learned not to take the receptionist’s word for how long a job will take. I’ll see how this holds up once the flooring begins. I also learned that sometimes what we think we want might not be the best in the long run. I also learned to be more like water and less like rock. It’s best to go with the flow in the beginning because the water will eventually erode the rock away. Besides, going with the flow is better on the blood pressure.

On to May and the Seven of Cups. It already seems appropriate.