Systems and Processes
To help ameliorate and soften the impact of apparent retrograde motions? I have a series of systems and processes in place.
The Portable Mercury Retrograde
The various systems and processes that I originally set up? I try to make this as intuitive as possible, with redundancy after redundancy baked into the mix, but does that always work?
Back-ups. Back-ups of back-ups. Automated back-up, duplicate and triplicate of all relevant data. Source files. Paper copies of most receipts.
One process that backfired because it was too complex?
I had a cheap, external disk with the system software automated back-up running. Kind of just a simple, standard way to do this, right? But I also had a separate folder, a sub-directory on that back-up disk with years and years of family photos, all digitized. Pictures of me with fish. Picture of family and friends. Old girlfriends. Catch and release. Just the usual digital ephemera one collects over time, mostly the super-large and now out-dated image formats. Used to take a large footprint.
But I grabbed one of the old, not quite recycled, but careful dated former back-up disks and reformatted it to experiment with a new system that would be useful moving forward, remote-like back-up. In doing so, I erased that huge collection of files of old photos; conveniently forgetting the original process, which included all those older images.
Kind of like throwing out the instructions, only to have to dig through the trash to find those instructions again.
“I got this.”
Apparently, I don’t “got this.”
The Portable Mercury Retrograde
Previously, I’ve expanded upon this data, but Mars entered Gemini in August of 2022, and then, hit a retrograde point October 30, 2022, and stays retrograde until January 11, 2023, with all of this action (or inaction) occurring totally within the confines of Gemini, a mercurial sign if there ever was one.
Mercury, alongside that Mars? Or rather, a few signs over, but in similar state of deshabille?
Think about those dates, how this aligns neatly Mars in Retrograde with Mercury in Retrograde.
The Portable Mercury Retrograde
Oddly enough, there’s a symmetry in the events, and way this serves as a reminder. Careful readers of my canon? Careful and observant patrons are aware of what to do, and what not to do.
I suggested, months back, that the year-end wrap-up get done, like before Thanksgiving. Maybe before Halloween. See how that times with Mr. Mars and his errant pathways, in Gemini? The kicker is the little mercurial Mercury, just doing a moonwalk in Capricorn, to thoroughly confuse matters.
None of this is bad. Inconvenient? Sure, there is that.
This is planetary double-check-up time. Like having set systems and processes in place, only to forget how, or what, we were saving.