Mercury is retrograde

 

Jeanne Marie

Mercury is in retrograde. NOTHING has been going right for the last couple of days. I cannot say the right things, forget how to do simple things on the computer, stare at my office desk as if it will sprout something. Mercury is in retrograde. ACK! 

Great.  We have an EXCUSE.  I had to get up this morning, as I count getting up (and morning), because Raphael was finally coming to pick up my old saggy laptop to beseech it to pass on its secrets to the flash shiny new laptop still on the launching pad back at the office.  He was going to meet me at the mews at 10.  So my alarm went off at 9 and I said right, okay, yes, I'm getting up now and . . . the next thing I knew something large and heavy was thudding through the mail slot in the front door AND IT WAS TEN O'CLOCK.

            I was racing around putting my jeans on backwards and my glasses on upside down* when I heard a phone message coming in.  Peter's voice:  You're probably on your way, he said.  But Raphael is here.  HE'S ALREADY HERE????  WHY DOES HE HAVE TO BE ON TIME TODAY?  HE'S VERY OFTEN—HE'S USUALLY—LATE.

            Hellhounds and I were in the car in just about a quarter of an hour, which is a new record.**  And then we got halfway down Main Street and came to an abrupt halt because . . . I don't know because what.  There was some gigantic highway maintenance vehicle parked—parked—in the middle of the intersection, thus blocking four streams of traffic, while some dipstick in a yellow reflective jacket dragged his mechanical equivalent around in some arcane pattern too abstruse for us mere apoplectic mortals.  What was the thing?  It looked like a cross between a trotting-race sulky and one of those garden-hosepipe-winding gizmos available at your friendly local garden centre.  Aside from the invisible-rune marking I couldn't see it was doing anything.  Except blocking traffic, of course.

            We were eventually allowed to rejoin our lives, which had run down the road ahead of us.  I tore into the mews courtyard and . . . And . . . Raphael has a motorcycle.  Whimper.  I miss riding horses more than I miss riding motorcycles but . . . whimper.  So he packed up my laptop and the seventeen tote bags of programme discs*** and told me that he'd bring the laptop back this evening.  This would mean I would not have to write tonight's blog on my knapsack computer—a sort of two-palm-top.  It's totally brilliant for the train, or for sitting in a café nursing your sixth cup of tea and pretending to work, but it is not ideal for common use.  Its main disadvantage is that the frelling screen doesn't open far enough—because it's so small you need to be able to open it out nearly flat so you don't have to crouch down and bend your neck the wrong way like a horse against the bit.  Except that you can't open it that far, so you can either give yourself permanent vertebral damage or prop the front edge of the keyboard up about six inches.†  It's also missing a few keys because the keyboard doesn't have room for the full complement.  It has the triple-dranglefabbing ratbag key down at the bottom left that MAKES YOUR ENTIRE DOCUMENT DISAPPEAR IF YOU ACCIDENTALLY NICK IT†† but it's missing the option that will let you toggle easily to the bottom of your document and back again.†††

            You know the end of this part of the story, right?  Raphael rang me at about three o'clock and said he wasn't going to be able to get my old laptop back to me tonight because there was so much stuff on it it was taking forever to do the transfer.  So I'm hunched over the little knapsack 'top tonight with two Yarn Harlot books‡ raising the front end.

            Meanwhile, after watching Raphael teem down the road in a terrifying red-shift blast,‡‡ I took hellhounds for a sprint and then hauled all of us back to the cottage again in time for the arrival of the Nonpareil House Alarm Man to spend thirty seconds making my house alarm go FEAR!  FIRE!  FOES!  AWAKE!‡‡‡ to prove that it can, and then giving me forty-six pages of annual certificate and an invoice for enough money to hire the horn section of a medium-sized orchestra for a year.  The hellhounds were very glad to see him.  Oh, he said bemusedly, emerging from the fawn-and-steel-grey maelstrom, aren't whippets and greyhounds usually rather shy?  Some are, I said noncommittally.  Of course he came at the end of the appointment slot he was going to arrive some time during, by which time it was now hammering down rain, and hellhounds had to be hurtled again.  They hate their raincoats almost as much as I hate the frelling ergonomic keyboard on my desktop.  I wish the thing would BREAK so I could buy a new one. . . . .§

            AND NIALL AND PENELOPE ARE GOING TO THE OPERA TOMORROW.  WHAT DO THEY WANT TO DO THAT FOR?  WHY CAN'T THEY GO TO THE MET LIVE ON SATURDAY LIKE ME?§§   NOOOOOOO.  THEY'RE GOING TO THE OPERA TOMORROW.  WHICH MEANS I AM IN CHARGE OF TOWER PRACTISE TOMORROW EVENING.  Here I was feeling chirpy for the first time today, because Gemma was ringing plain courses of both bob minor and bob major on handbells tonight, straight through without looking at the lines, and may be going to make a handbell ringer after all.

             It was after this that hellhounds and I re-arrived, dripping, at the mews, and I discovered that I'd left my working hard copy of SHADOWS back at the cottage. 

            And now . . . I have to go sing.  Maybe I'll work on Eensy Teensy Spider. 

* * *

* Today was not one of my pinnacle of alternative fashion days either. 

** I had my socks in one pocket and my necklace and earrings in another.  I finally remembered to brush my hair after lunch.

*** He has three enormous carrier bags and . . . he had to do some substantial rearranging to get it all in. 

† Knitting-bag-sized knitting books are ideal for this purpose. 

†† In the time it takes to hit 'undo' you can have several heart attacks.  Now someone tell me what the hell this option is for?  The technological equivalent of the hollow tooth filled with cyanide in case you're captured by enemy agents?  WHOOPS—there went the immaculate proofs for superstring theory, the equations for cold fusion, and the recipe for foolproof meringues!  Sorrrreeeeeeee! 

††† Which is emphatically less than desirable for situations involving frequent footnotes.  However my knapsack computer predates the blog by several years. 

‡ Things I Learned from Knitting and At Knit's End.  And the whole works is raised up half an inch off the table by The A to Z of Knitting which has become my default beginner how-to book, not because it is a good book and has lots of nice clear photographs of things like which way to wrap your yarn when knitting and/or purling, but because it has ROSES on the cover.  http://www.amazon.com/Z-Knitting-Ultimate-Beginner-Advanced/dp/1564777847 

‡‡ I lie.  Raphael is a very nice, polite, corporate young man who left the gravel-strewn mews jigsaw courtyard tactfully, which is to say standing looking after him wistfully as he left I was not scarred for life by the backlash.  And . . . his bike is navy blue.  Which is very sensible if you want to drive it to work, when you're a nice polite corporate young man.  But I didn't know they even made bikes in navy blue. 

‡‡‡ The official Brandybuck horn is not available, but we do our best. 

§ But not till after I get SHADOWS turned in. 

§§ I've told you, haven't I, that this Saturday is Rodelinda . . . which means I get to hear either Renee Fleming or Andreas Scholl singing Frelling Dove Sei.  And I'm going to this one, even if—as seems likely if this miserable weather continues—I am a grand throbbing assortment of aches and pains again.  Snarl.