Moon buzzed into Gemini Sunday night at 7:07PM ET, looking for something to talk about, no doubt. Planetary patterns are fairly light this week; Thursday is looking like the most intense day, as that will be the day the Moon will make contact with the Planetary Pattern Everyone Should Be Talking About, a.k.a., the never-ending Uranus-Pluto square. Otherwise, harmonious aspects between assertive Mars and expansive Jupiter, and mental Mercury and dirt-revealing Pluto favor an easy flow of physical energy and investigative thinking this week.

Your Moon voids this week — natural rest periods when efforts to move forward in a straight line are more likely to be fraught with delays, flakes and unusual twists — are as follows:  Tuesday 10:59AM ET until 6:23AM ET on Wednesday; Friday 2:11 AM ET until 6:56PM ET.

And now, the news. In light of Sunday’s illuminating Full Moon (refer to Friday’s forecast for details), combined with the witchy-bitchy/controversial attraction potential of last week’s challenge between Venus (women, love, social expression) and Uranus-Pluto, it’s interesting to note an escalating feud between the Cheney sisters making front-page headlines (Liz Cheney’s body language in the linked photo says it all). So far, Liz Cheney appears to be fulfilling the potential of her horoscope, discussed here in July as she was contemplating her current carpetbagging effort to win a Senate seat in Wyoming.

Also expressing the potential suggested by Venus-Uranus-Pluto: Doris Lessing, an uninhibited and unconventional Nobel prize-winning author, passed away at age 94.  Here’s an excerpt from her Times obituary :

But it was her breakthrough novel, “The Golden Notebook,” a structurally inventive and loosely autobiographical tale, that remained her best-known work. The 1962 book was daring in its day for its frank exploration of the inner lives of women who, unencumbered by marriage, were free to raise children, or not, and pursue work and their sex lives as they chose. The book dealt openly with topics like menstruation and orgasm, as well as with the mechanics of emotional breakdown.

In other news, deadly tornadoes hit the Midwest.  And TEPCO has begun the ambitious, risky process of removing spent fuel rods from Fukushima — and every time I write about this situation I find myself holding my breath as I type. Seems Fukushima makes news each time a planet makes contact with the Uranus-Pluto square; keep an eye out for more developments around Dec 22nd- 31st, when Mars and the Sun will both engage. That is looking to be a volatile period, as past Mars-Uranus-Pluto contacts would suggest. You’ll feel it more personally if you were born 8-12 days into Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn…or if you have a planet or angle at 8 to 12 degrees of those signs.