Mecury in retrograde

So Dave told me Mercury was retrograde when we came back from NYC on Monday night and discovered half of our electric was out, just like last May. Tuesday the rest of it went out with a fizz and our carbon monoxide alarm screaming, so naturally I called the fire department. It was out for good, and that meant the furnace too.

The excavator and electrician from May got together and dig what they could, but they needed National Grid to turn off the power at the street. Just before noon on Wednesday, after probably a dozen emergency calls to the electric company over 12 hours and one in-person visit by yours truly, we still had no one to turn off the power. Oh, and they cut the cable/internet/phone line because Dig Safe had marked it wrong.

Then I made one more call to the emergency number, and the operator knew all about us and said the truck was in downtown Northampton and would be at our place within a half an hour -- but hold on and she would get her supervisor to call the dispatcher to make sure. She comes back to me and says yes, 30 minutes.

A truck pulls up two minutes later. The guy says he just got the call. He was at D'Angelo's (a mile away) getting lunch. It was the first call he'd gotten. Oh, and he'd been on the next street over the entire day yesterday.

It was then that Dave told me Mercury had gone direct about 1o minutes earlier . . .

At any rate, we got power by about 3 pm, but no cable/internet/modem until Friday afternoon. And Dave wants me to note that we lost a snake in the process. It may or may not have been Sylvia, who lives in the wall next to our garage, but whoever it was, she was flattened all over the driveway. Even if it wasn't Sylvia, but he thinks it was, it was very sad.

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I spent most of my vacation week reading Harry Potter from start to finish again, so hey, it wasn't a total bust. (And cleaned the house, and spent good time with Lily, and got grumpy with Dave about the electricity.)