What is Mercury Retrograde?

The Roman God Mercury painted by Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617). This image is in the public domain and was retrieved from Wikipedia Commons.

Mercury is the planet closest to the sun in the Solar System. In astrology, Mercury is called the messenger of the gods and rules communications, travel, trickery, and healing. The mythological god Mercury is usually depicted with wings on his heels or head. The planet Mercury appears to go backwards when it goes around the sun. That’s Mercury Retrograde.

The retrograde periods last about three weeks and occur about three times a year.

The next Mercury Retrograde period will be in Scorpio from November 6th to 26th. Look out!

After all the trouble I had with my computer this last Mercury Retrograde period in Leo, I’m thinking that maybe in November I’ll play it safe and stick to cleaning my house and writing Christmas cards.

More Mercury Retrograde problems–from diverted mail to cancelled flights to computer viruses to threats of being “downsized”

Here are some communication/travel/technology problems I heard about from friends that occurred during the last Mercury Retrograde:

• A friend’s son was about to close on the purchase of his first house but a check he had been promised did not arrive in the mail as promised. It turned out that the envelope containing the check had been addressed incorrectly and had be delivered to someone else’s address.
• While flying back from a work travel, a friend’s flight became delayed and then cancelled at her connecting flight with the result that she had to stay overnight and arrived home a day late.
• Someone’s modem broke
• The guy who fixed my hard drive and helped me upload the operating system, utilities, drivers, updates, and software to repair my “injured” computer told me that 75 percent of the tech support calls he had been received in the last couple of weeks (during Mercury Retrograde) had been because of computer viruses, a much higher percentage than usual. He confided that at his home, one end of an electric cord he had bought only three months before blew up and turned black.
• Someone I know was shocked to receive a notice that his place of employment was trying to downsize him.

Did you have similar problelms between July 14th and August 7th?

Two computers failured during Mercury Retrograde

Yesterday I said that I would tell you about the problems I had during the last Mercury Retrograde period. Well, this is what happened.

Not one, but two of my computers broke. One of the them, it was the hard drive. That meant that I had to not only get a new hard drive, but also load the operating system, drivers, utilities, updates, and all my software!!!

It took over a week to get everything straightened out–coincidentally, just as soon as Mercury came out of Mercury Retrograde.

The other broken computer? I haven’t taken it on yet, but am spending my time catching up on a week’s lost work with the one that’s fixed.