I am not an astrologer, but I owned a new age store for five years and absorbed a bit of astrological information. There two things that we always kept track of, and we'd even get phone calls from customers asking about. One was if the moon was waxing or waning. The other was if Mercury was retrograde, which means that it is moving backward in relation to the earth. (It isn't actually moving backwards.)

Mercury rules commerce and communication and when it seems to move backwards it tends to disrupt both of these things. It's really a time to sit back and meditate, because trying to get any kind of business done is an uphill battle. Things to avoid during Mercury retrograde include important business transactions, which will be fraught with communication problems and starting new endeavors, which will be impermanent.

I warned my father and step-mother, who used to change houses and jobs with some frequency, about Mercury retrograde so much that they started to ask me about it unsolicited.

So it suddenly struck me, a few days ago, that here I am about to FINALLY buy a house and I don't even know if Mercury is retrograde. A post on another blogger's site had me wondering too - she seemed to be suffering from a classic case of Mercury retrograde along with a half a dozen other people who left comments.

So I looked. And it is.

There is a part of me that is relieved. Although I feel really lucky and grateful to finally be buying a house, it's a far cry from my dream house, and if it's temporary, well that probably means that something better is coming along soon.

I just hope I don't get sick tomorrow, because THAT would be classic Mercury retrograde too.