Mercury retrograde and my iBook

Since the planet Mercury is in retrograde, I decided it would be a fine time to reformat the hard drive on my iBook. Foolish, foolish mortal! I risked the trickster nature of the god, and I lost.

Mercury, as you likely know, governs communication and travel. When Mercury goes retrograde, which happens three times each year for about three weeks, we are advised to slow down, think matters through before acting, regroup, rethink, put off important decisions, and take special care with travel plans and communication. It isn't the time to reformat a hard drive.

I needed to reformat because I installed Tiger (the newest Mac OS) on my 20-month-old iBook G4 about a month ago, and ever since, my computer has been running slowly and programs have been frequently closing without my prompting. I was seeing way too much of that little spinning rainbow circle. This was driving me crazy. The advice I got was (a) to do a "clean" reinstall of Tiger and (b) to upgrade my RAM to 512 MB. Since the RAM will cost me $150, I decided to do the reinstall first to see if that helped matters. The good news is that it has.

The bad news is that I lost data. In moving information from the iBook to my external hard drive and back onto the reformatted iBook, I managed to lose: the contents of my address book, all archived email messages, and all Firefox preferences (which allow me to navigate my blog-world - what you don't know is that I have two other blogs). Notice anything about the particular data I lost? Yep, it all has to do with communication. Ha!

I wanted to blame someone for this misfortune, but despite the fact that Adonis was helping me, I couldn't blame him, since it wasn't his fault. We did everything by the book, we believe. We have no idea what happened ... except that we tempted Mercury, and he laughed at us.

Be careful out there.