Mercury Retro

NASA photo of Mercury in retrograde

Three times a year, the planet Mercury turns retrograde – that is, it appears to slow down, then stops, then seems to move backward. In astrology, Mercury is the planet that rules communication, travel, moving parts, learning, siblings, your neighborhood and neighbors, education, and contracts.

During a retro period, communications often go awry. If you’re traveling, your itinerary can change without warning. Appliances break down, your computer acts up, your phone goes down, your iPad crashes, your car goes on the fritz. It’s usually a time of delays and not particularly favorable for launching new projects, making manuscript submissions, signing contracts. To mitigate some of the effects, I advise people to follow the rule of three Rs: revise, review, reconsider.

During the last retro in late January/early February, we had to buy a new dishwasher and then had to hire someone to install it because the laminate flooring we’d had put down in our kitchen was too high to remove the old dishwasher. The repairman was great knew what he was doing and the new dishwasher works perfectly. But the preliminaries were annoying.

The current retro started on May 19, with Mercury in Gemini, my sign, and ends on June 11 – not soon enough for me! During this period I should have followed the advice I usually give to other people. A couple of days before the retro began, two things happened. While updating one of our websites, I made a mistake that couldn’t be corrected and we had to change the URL for our blog. The second thing was that our washing machine stopped working. After Googling around for possible reasons, I hoped it would be something simple and called a repair service.

It wasn’t simple.

As the repairman explained, most washers these days come with computer motherboards and when the motherboards go out, that’s it for the washer. So Rob went online and ordered a new machine from Home Depot that would be delivered in a few days – during the retro period. When I saw the confirmation email, I realized he had ordered a dryer – not a washer – and he had to cancel the order and order again. Now the delivery date had been moved ahead by nearly a week. First big snafu and, oh shudder, no washing machine for nearly a week. I ended up doing a wash at our neighbor’s house.

The washer was installed without any issues over the long Memorial Day weekend. Fantastic, I thought. That was the big snafu for this retro. WRONG. Today I discovered that Time Passages, an astrology program I have on my iPad and iPhone, is available now for iMacs. It’s a wonderful program and I was excited that there was something, finally, available for the iMac operating system.

I tried downloading the demo to make sure it worked on my computer. It didn’t. I emailed support and a few hours later received an email with a link about which demo to download for my operating system. I replied to the support person that I wanted to buy the advanced version of the software but – jokingly- remarked that I should probably wait until after Mercury turns direct. But impatient Gemini that I am, I couldn’t wait for another ten days and purchased the advanced version tonight. I was looking forward to entering a bunch of charts in my new software program.

I received an email confirmation of the purchase, with the enabling codes that would unlock the full features of the version I had bought. But the enabling code didn’t work. I downloaded this sucker half a dozen times, kept cutting and pasting the enabling code from my confirmation email, and it still doesn’t work.

The message? Chill. Slow down. BREATHE. At some point, someone will get back to me and the problem will be fixed. And if it isn’t, I’ll cancel the credit card payment and look elsewhere.

But my Mercury retro snafus pale compared to another retro story I heard today. The son of a friend of ours is a successful videographer who owns some expensive equipment essential for his job. The producer of a video he’s working on now wanted to save money so instead of renting an equipment van, he combined the equipment with the food van.

A large cooler filled with ice was placed on top of his $60,000 camera, the ice melted and the water seeped into the camera, ruining it. Fortunately, the young man insured the camera. But in the years since he bought it, the price has risen to $80,000 and he isn’t sure if the insurance will cover the new full price.

His take? “Mom, I now believe in Mercury retrogrades.”

Even though I believe we write our own destinies, that we create our own realities, there’s no doubt that we are influenced by what the planets are doing. Ask any ER nurse about what happens in a hospital emergency room during a full moon.

Rob and I just finished a proposal called Precogs: The Dynamics of Future-Telling, something we actually started four years ago – okay under a Merc retro to revisit stuff from the past   – but we won’t be submitting it to our agent until after June 11.