Aug 20th – The AMR (Aligned for Mercury Retrograde) session is over and I am getting ready to leave for the weekend .   Its my mother’s birthday and all the daughters are showing up for the weekend.  I get a call to say bring the keys as the phone entry system telecom thing is not working.   Cool – a problem and I am informed about it BEFORE I leave town.

August 22 – we are driving back from St. Catharine’s to Toronto on the QEW.  It’s the fastest route to Toronto and staying within the speed limit (or keeping up with the middle lane of traffic) we can be home in 75 minutes.  I love the drive from Niagara to the scenic bit over the Burlington skyway where you can see Toronto on the Lake Ontario shoreline when glancing east or the big steel mill glancing left.  After that the landscape is a boring mix of industrial land or shopping malls. 

Today just off the ramp and around the bend from the skyway traffic grinds to a halt – unusual for a Sunday early afternoon.  I don’t think too much about it, and just crawl along with the others.  It’s hard to see what’s ahead.  My sister notices a van darting out and off an exit ramp we are just approaching. She says “maybe we should do that too”.   I flick on my signal light, check the lanes which are clear and respond with “yes I think you are right” and take the exit headed towards the Lakeshore drive.  This route will take us through the small towns on the lake, and past the luxury mansions that have sprung up on this route in the last few years. It is a far more visually appealing route than the rest of the QEW.  As we exit the ramp I now have a full view of the highway several miles ahead. It’s bumper to bumper of stopped cars going nowhere and an ambulance vehicle lights and siren blaring trying to get through.  I send prayers ahead for those who might need it – even though I don’t know who they are and express gratitude that I am not in that snarled mess of traffic.   The drive along the Lakeshore Drive at least to Oakville, puts 20 extra minutes on our trip, makes the drive more interesting and leaves me in awe and wonder about being aligned with Mercury retrograde as I am sure, I could have just as easily been trapped in the traffic backlog for an hour or two.

August 25th – sharing my mother’s retrograde nightmare.  Last Friday morning, my mother takes out cash from her local bank machine. She leaves in a hurry to get to her second-hand book store for a new supply of Agatha Christie and realizes she does not have the money! She zips back to the bank, and asks the tellers about it. They explain that if she left the money in the machine and it was not picked up in 60 seconds that the machine sucks it back in. They won’t be able to tell her until after closing time, so they’ll call on Monday. (this all had to happened during the session) Then, at 2:00PM she received a call from the bank, – a customer after her in line, realized he had too much money from the machine, and turned around after his first errand to return it. They called her right away. I say she is aligned.