This may sound like just so much superstition to some. And coincidence. Or perhaps “coincidence” is all many of us can think to call it when a number of similar events occur in the same time period. Anyway, here’s the tale …

As best as I can remember, a number of times each year the planet Mercury appears to reverse its orbit and move backward. During these times Mercury is said to have gone “retrograde.” Astrologers believe that two of the effects of a retrograde Mercury are miscommunication and the failure of machinery and electronic equipment.

Well, Mercury is retrograde and has been for some time now. I am not certain, however, for how long to this point. Since May my website and this blog have been hacked, getting me bounced temporarily from Twitter; our burner has needed to be replaced, as did our stove; the replacement for the stove arrived damaged and itself had to be replaced; and my four-year old dual processor G5 PowerMacintosh failed.

The website and blog are back. The blog just sort of, as its archives remain missing in action and “the look” is still in the process of returning. The new burner installed okay, but trouble with the area that housed it required a return visit from the installer to get right. I already mentioned how the new stove also needed replacing. (The latter did result in a better stove for the lesser price of the first.)

The computer would have cost more to repair than its current value. It was a real workhorse; I have no regrets and feel I received my money’s worth. I wound up buying a new iMac that is more computer than any tower I ever owned. And I now have a two-monitor setup.

Throughout all this I managed to keep working on the new (as of April) laptop, a 17-inch MacBook Pro. I did a round of corrections on the teacher’s guide to a boxed set of materials for teaching students to read and write, as well as first pages for a book on wind turbines and sample pages for a bawdy history of Waco, Texas.

With a machine on my desktop, however, I return to business as usual, with vastly improved tools. I will again blog about the business, life, and work of a freelance book designer.

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Looking at what I wrote above, I mourn the loss of that 17-inch MacBook Pro. For over 11 years it served me. When it died almost a year ago, I lost not just my back-up machine, but also my away-from-the-studio machine. And Apple had discontinued a 17-inch laptop. Thankfully, they’ve come up with a 16-inch MacBook Pro.