You may remember we have had this conversation before:
It has to do with how events seem to cluster in life. Sometimes the way life rolls out, seems like you can do nothing wrong.
Then there are days like Wednesday when everything you put your hands on turns to doggie-do.
The Facts:
Wednesday around here started off perfect (as most days will). Had a great Peoplenomics column. Elaine whipped up the usual (and now we’re informed – Cancer-causing) breakfast.
Nothing odd about that, but one of the egg yokes broke. This happens so infrequently that it’s a miracle. When E breaks a yoke it seems to signify that statistics are about to turn against us. E’s been cooking for more than half a century. How much longer is classified somewhere above missile launch codes. But let’s just say she is an expert in the kitchen. Egg-cidents don’t just happen to her. Period.
Still, everything tasted great and shortly thereafter I sat down at the computer intending to answer emails – including from from a young reader who is becoming an airline pilot.
But, it wasn’t meant to be.
“Your battery needs to be charged. Consider plugging in your laptop” the 17” Samsung at my overstuffed chair advised me.
“What the hell? It IS plugged in,” I told myself.
Still, just to make sure, I pulled all the plugs, reset the transient scrubber…you know – all that “supposed to fix it” kind of crap. All to no avail.
“Seven minutes remaining.” Another pop-up on the screen..
Say, this is turning into something “un-fun.”
Turned out to be a lie, too. The screen went black in less than five minutes.
The last time the laptop power cube went out, we were up with Branson, Missouri with the Landry’s – seems that was a couple of three years ago. That’s when the original power supply failed.
Powr+ brand, by the way. The heck of it is that I had the thought cross my mind not three weeks back “Gee, should I get a back-up for the laptop supply? It has failed before… Naw, not now, too busy.”
Bad call.
On the way back from taking cover pictures for the upcoming novel, Panama and I swung by Wal-Mart to pick up a replacement. They had a laptop power supply that would work with laptops.
Got it home, opened it up – no tips. On inspection, the box had been opened by some partial shoplifter who had taken the adapter tips only. This was a fact undiscovered until I got home.
So Elaine offers to run it back into town (half-hour each way) and a little over an hour later she triumphantly returns. Only the power supply she comes back with doesn’t fit Samsungs. Lenovo and half a dozen others? Sure. So this morning, she will take it back and tell the staff S-A-M-S-U-N-G.
While she was off being run around the block in town, I discovered that the FedEx people had delivered my new air compressor I was telling you about.
Works fine, except it was damaged in shipping. The two pressure gauges (tank and down line pressure) were smashed. Oh, and the handle doesn’t fit because one of the brackets was smashed out of round.
So off goes the customer service email on whether I return the entire machine or whether I fix the handle (easy) and they just send me the two replacement gauges so I can call that project complete.
Seems stupid to do anything else, but who knows. In the meantime, until that’s resolved, the shop is out of commission because it’s got compressor shipping materials all over the place.
The rest of the afternoon was spent re-tasking the Supercomputer (i7 920 12gB, 500 gab SSD, multiple multi-TB additional drives on which my copy of Nostracodeus.com software lives) so that it would pick up email which had previously gone to the laptop.
This morning I will actually go read all those emails.
That handled, the media computer in the living room (from whence I write this morning) was loaded with my site authoring tool…and in answer to reader Nelson, the configuration of that tool puts up a temporary post to download format of the site – which is why feed readers may have seen a strange looking post from me that made no sense. It did to the computers.
Amazon is overnighting not one but TWO laptop power supplies. And as long as I was at it, I tossed in a new battery for the laptop, as well.
But that’s not the point of this morning’s discussion, although it’s one hell of a lead-in.
Our real point is about how everyone has a “Personal Retrograde.”
The last time I wrote up a longish article on Personal Retrograde was back in December of 2014 – the article is over here.
Here’s the interesting thing: In that article (Dec 30,2014, I noted that the retrograde date was January 21st. So my personal retrograde seemed at that time to come three weeks ahead of the “recognized” date.
Fast-forward to the now. If this crackpot theory of mine is right – namely that we all have a personal offset from the generalized retrograde – then we should see a retrograde around November 17-19.
What’s this? Mercury is NOT retrograde in three weeks. But here’s the interesting thing: We are about three weeks after Mercury goes direct station.
For what it is worth, the discovery du jour is that may actually have two positions in their charts where Mercury-like events may cluster: One date would be in the vicinity of retrograde (mine is about three weeks ahead of it). The other would be related to Mercury on-station in which case my offset would be 19-days after.
Now that I have all this figured out, life should get back to normal rather quickly. The compressor gauges issue will be resolved, the new power cubes and battery will arrive – and things in the Ure household will be back to normal.
I would ask you to do a little research. Astrology would not have been around for a few thousand years if there was nothing to it. (The same could be said about major religions, as well.)
So next time you suffer a day where multiple things go wrong, jot down the dates and check them out against a retrograde source. You may be surprised what you find.
On the other hand, it could have just been “The Bates Luck” that was rubbing off – my brother-in-law was present much of yesterday and his relationship with luck is legendary around here.
For example: While on one of his combat tours in ‘Nam, he suffered a terrible leg wound. Bad luck. Fortunately, a medic got to him and got him into the closest LZ for medevac.
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