an illustrated example of Murphy's Law

Mercury is in retrograde. I know I've said this before and everyone looks at me as if I'm crazy. But this time, I didn't know it until circumstances became so ridiculous that I knew it just HAD to be. And sure enough! It went into retrograde on Nov. 14 and will be so until Dec. 3.

Now, I can well understand why people might not understand why heavenly bodies would have any influence whatsoever on the mundane doings of people on Earth. I would agree. However, it's pretty amazing how sometimes astrological bullshit can be quite on the dot. How many plane crashes have happened in the past week? I think I've already heard of two. Mercury is supposed to be the planet of communication and so computers crash, planes crash, and genuine mayhem usually occurs to some degree. The last time it was in retrograde, I had to fly to New York, and I can't tell you how many crazy things went wrong. I lost my luggage for the first time in my life; I had to choose to fly into Westchester instead of La Guardia because otherwise I'd have spent the next fourteen hours on a cot in O'Hare; etc., etc.

Anyway, here's how I knew this time. I had to fly back from DC and had a connecting flight in Chicago about 45 minutes after my first flight was supposed to arrive. Then we waited on the runway for 45 minutes, so I called the airline to tell them that I thought I would miss my connecting flight. I was told that I had been put into the system on two completely different flights, going into and out of St. Louis and not Chicago. But since I had the Chicago ticket in hand, I would be much better off connecting to my scheduled flight.

We managed to make it into Chicago at about 12:50 and my flight was supposed to leave at 1:25. But then we had to sit and wait while the paramedics removed a sick passenger (circa twenty minutes). At that point everyone was really anxious to get off, even though one of the stewardesses told everyone that she was sure everyone would make their connecting flights (she must have seriously spaced out mine). I was in the very last row of a packed plane, too. So fifteen minutes after that, I finally got off the plane and had to run what I think is quite literally the equivalent of two miles. Here's a little diagram--I had to get from the very, tip-toppy end of G to the very, tip-toppy end of H In two minutes. Luckily that flight was delayed and I wasn't stuck in Chicago until 11 PM!