First Hot One

Spartacus – Photo: L. Weikel

I wasn’t sure how I wanted to title tonight’s post. Obviously, it’s a commentary on Spartacus’s sprawling position under the birdfeeders today. With his toy and a bottle nearby (albeit of olive oil), you would be forgiven for assuming Spart had partaken in a night of debauchery. Instead of “First Hot One,” I nearly named it, “What a Night!”

I chose “First Hot One,” because like clockwork, the solstice occurs and we get slammed with oppressive heat and humidity. And that definitely was the case today, although I know the humidity can (and will) get even worse.

But today was one of the first days of truly summer weather. The thunderheads gathering in massive, billowing threats on the horizon struck fear in our hearts as we crested the first hill on our shorter trek. A jagged flash of piercing lightning struck just ahead of us, and almost instantaneously a massive thunder clap let us know that jagged strike had issued forth much closer than was comfortable

Sheila’s daily constitutional would have to be cut short tonight, which was not a welcome development for either of us. I needed a walk. Desperately.

Crisis Averted

Why? Because unbelievably (in hindsight), I tried to help my laptop complete its Windows 10 update (which it insisted on telling me day after day was needed) but which it kept informing me was unable to be consummated because I didn’t have enough memory on my laptop. So I bit the bullet. I took care of business with an external hard drive and moved some files around.

And I forgot Mercury was retrograde.

I actually forgot that messing around with my laptops when Mercury is retrograde has not ended well for me in the past. Indeed, I’ve even written about some of those debacles – at length – and the disastrous results that, for one thing, explain why I write all of my posts on my Apple instead of the Dell.

How did I forget the sins of my past?!

Black Screen White Cursor

Well, that just goes to show how we can get lulled into a sense of complacency and then – bam!

All of a sudden, I was looking at a black screen. Not a blue screen of death (thank goodness), but a black screen that I couldn’t coax into doing anything else. No control-alt-delete. No holding the power button down for a really, really long time. Nothing. In fact, it looked as though the power was off, although eventually a white cursor seemed to randomly show up. But that was it, the only concession the machine would make to me bringing it inside. (Karl insisted it was probably just hot.)

And that’s when it hit me that I’d been to this rodeo with this stupid computer (the Dell) – once before – during Mercury Retrograde.

All’s well that ends well (so far anyway). It looks like this snafu may have been connected to the Windows update.

Would someone please remind me never to update Windows again when Mercury is retrograde?!

After all was said and done, believe me when I say that I felt like Spartacus looks in that photo above. Worn the heck out.

So much for the first hot one of the season.