Mercury Trine Uranus

According to the cookbooks, this aspect should have you mentally wide-awake and bursting with new ideas, experimenting with all kinds of ground-breaking solutions to old problems, and deciding to take yourself off on a jaunt to somewhere you've never been before.

I'm not sure that calling your sister in Spain qualifies as any of the above, but that's what I did in the morning and then it was back to the woodpile, stacking more logs and getting one of the piles covered with a tarp before the bad weather sets in.

My staying power as far as throwing logs around goes is minimal. Five minutes and I'm out of breath and have to do something else for a while. Most of my beautiful cornflowers are dead now but I still can't bring myself to pull them up, so I started taking cuttings from the ivy that's threatening to overrun one of the flowers beds and transplanting it to other bare patches where I think it will do well.

The weather here right now - mid October, a time when I'm rarely here - is beautiful. Clear,sunny, dry, 75 degrees or so during the day, mid-40s at night, and I'm trying to make the most of it. It was an extraordinarily wet summer with no chance to even think about weeding in between thunderstorms, so after sticking my few stalks of ivy into new ground and giving them a drink I suddenly decided to start weeding the driveway, which can only be described as a complete exercise in futility.

Aha, though, I thought - Mercury, hands, I'm doing something unexpected, Uranus, and sat myself down on an upturned milk crate with my weeder tool and started pulling up some of the grasses embedded in what's left of the gravel after the rains washed most of it away. I was tastefully attired, as I always am when gardening, in a pair of paint-spattered bike shorts and a 25-cent t-shirt with the sleeves cut off from Gospel Mission thrift shop, but as I'm at the end of a dirt road and always know when someone's coming I never need to be "dressed".

The Sweet Pea was stretched out in the sun nearby, I was chatting away with myself as is my wont when alone - natal retrograde Mercury in twelve? - and I must have cleared a good two square feet of the 7,500 square foot driveway when a standard issue New Mexico pick-up truck came lumbering along and a neighbor jumped out waving a handful of envelopes and magazines. "Mailman put all your mail in my box", he said, handing it to me, wishing me a good evening, and finally manifesting Mercury trine Uranus for me for the day. It simply never fails, this astrology stuff.