So, how am I spending this Mercury retrograde? Well, in no particular order…

• I’ve been updating this site and getting its related nuts and bolts working as they should. I’d hoped to get to this project before the retrograde, but life and other projects got in the way.
• I had two large writing tasks to take care of, which each involved around thirty thousand words.
• It looks like one of those projects is going to be cancelled, or at the very least so thoroughly re-imagined that I’ll have to re-write basically all of it.
• For reasons best left unexamined, I need to get my old laptop back in working condition for someone to use as a temporary system.
• And wouldn’t you know it, the laptop decided it didn’t know what a “wireless network adapter” was, nor was it having any of the dozen or so different drivers I downloaded from the manufacturer’s site and sneaker-netted over to the machine on a thumb drive.
• I ultimately had to go online and order a ten-dollar, USB wi-fi adapter to get it connected to the network and start doing updates.
• There were years worth of updates, by the way, since the only legit copy of Windows I had to spare was a DVD of Windows 8.1 which I think I bought four years ago.
• Oh, and I had to download and run the “Windows Update Troubleshooter” from Microsoft before the machine would even do the updates, because otherwise it just sat there for half an hour “checking for updates” until giving up and telling me there were none to be had.
• That fixed, the laptop has been sitting on my kitchen counter, downloading and installing updates for about sixteen hours, and it’s still going.
• Oh, and yesterday my father asked if I could do a wipe and reset of his old laptop, so he can give it to a friend who also suddenly needs a temporary machine.

Right now, the astro-weather is pretty terrible in general, and Mercury-type stuff in particular is more likely to go off the rails than to go smoothly. And yet, here I am, tweaking websites, moving projects along, and setting up computers. Why? Am I just bad at making decisions?

Yes. Yes I am. But there’s also an underlying logic to just parking my butt in the chair and force-marching my way through this stuff.

Ultimately, no matter what the astrology has to say about it, you have to live your life.

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about how electional astrology was theoretically about planning ahead, but usually comes down to making the best out of a bad situation.

Did I want to be doing all of this stuff right now? Not even a little bit. But what else can you do when the work comes to your door demanding to be done, or friends and family come knocking with their computer problems?

You can’t always say no, nor should you.

It basically comes down to acceptance, at that point. You do the work, knowing that things aren’t likely to go as planned, but that sooner or later you’ll get through it. A Mercury retrograde is almost always more annoying than disastrous, especially if you know it’s coming, and you can give yourself extra-time to deal with the inevitable delays and reversals.

What would be disastrous, though, is getting stuck in an endless waiting game. Waiting for the astro-weather to clear up, waiting for that “perfect” chart or transit, waiting, waiting, waiting…

Anyway, what do you think of the site’s new look?