May
26
2009
Luck — Good and Bad
Author: Ben GruagachI had an amazingly lucky week last week. Unfortunately it was mostly bad luck.
Perhaps it was the astrological influences in play that tipped things for me. I get a daily astrological forecast in my email, and early last week it warned about big unstable influences, mostly related to Mercury. Mercury’s associations are with health (the doctor’s symbol, the caduceus, originated with Mercury), with information, and with travel.
And boy, would I feel how that impacts my life!
It started with health for me. On Tuesday afternoon I had just finished lunch (sushi picked up at the grocery store) and was going from the kitchen into the hallway. We have a puppy in our house, and have those baby gate things up to keep the puppy in certain areas like the kitchen and family room. So as I was going out of the kitchen I had to step over a baby gate. I caught my foot on the top of it, lost my balance, and fell over.
And stretched the muscle in my hip. Very painful.
I lay on the floor for a bit in pain. I got up and discovered how much it hurt to walk. Then I started to feel nauseous.
Perhaps it was the sushi which can be off if you don’t get it fresh. Perhaps it was the pain from the fall. In any case, I felt REALLY SICK all of a sudden. I hobbled to the bathroom and was there for about half an hour feeling ready to hurl any second. I ended up not throwing up but the nausea stayed with me the rest of the day.
So did the pain in my hip, of course.
Luckily the kids got home from school and were able to help me with looking after the puppy and with getting a simple supper together. I went to bed early and felt much better the next morning.
Then on Wednesday, which of all the days of the week really is Mercury’s day, my computer hard drive (information storage after all) decided it was not going to work any more. Without a hard drive a computer really can’t do much. You can’t boot the system because the operating system is on the hard drive. You can’t do ANYTHING without a hard drive.
We have another computer in the house (the one the kids use) so I went to it to try and troubleshoot my problem. Nothing worked. It looked like my hard drive really was dead, or else something that the hard drive connected to was not working. I could just see it now — a fried motherboard or CPU or something like that which would mean a completely dead computer. A hard drive can be replaced but anything bigger means basically buying a new computer.
Later in the day on Wednesday things got even more interesting.
I was in the back yard with the puppy around 6PM when some kids came out of the trails in the conservation area behind our house. They were a bit scared. They asked me if we had any buckets they could borrow as there was a fire in the forest behind our house and they were trying to put it out. They had a bucket but they needed more. I told them I’d call the fire department to come and help put the fire out.
So I called 911 and explained things, and the fire department showed up. The big fire truck and everything. Luckily (good luck this time) the fire wasn’t too bad so it took them only about fifteen or twenty minutes to get it all taken care of. I’m glad they were able to make sure things didn’t get out of control.
Meanwhile, I made an appointment with a local computer store to have my computer checked out. Which brings me to Thursday morning. I packed up my computer and went off to see what could be done with it. The support guys were very helpful and determined that it was the hard drive (and not something more serious.) Unfortunately all my info on the drive was beyond help. But good luck kicked in and they were able to give me a replacement drive for free. They popped it in and I was all set.
Well almost all set. I still had to go home and reinstall everything starting with the operating system.
It took a couple of days to get the software I wanted reinstalled, and things set up the way I like to work. I didn’t lose much of my important data except I did lose some of my address book. I can get the email addresses for pretty much everyone from my mail (it was backed up so I didn’t lose any of that). I’ll just have to email people to ask for their phone numbers and mailing addresses again, which is probably good as it means I’ll get recent versions of all those where the old address book probably had some out of date ones.
So as you can see, lots of luck — just not always the good kind. But I do thank my lucky stars that they were just minor inconveniences and nothing life-and-death.
Now I’m off to pay Mercury a little more homage. Gotta get on His good side!
