Retrograde Saturn Opposed to Mercury Exact

No tricksterism from The Cosmic Chiropractor on the day itself - communication pure and simple was the focus. I was already on my second Tracfone, the first succumbing to a protracted soak in Nyquil, interestingly enough on a long car trip last Easter. I'd bought the original on John's urgings back in the days when Uranus was in the Eleventh and I was making frequent trips to California to see him, often in the dead of night on desert back roads. There would have been no reception anyway if I had ever needed to use the phone. but I never did, and my having it set his mind at rest.


These days I need the thing only when I'm babysitting, and am so unused to it I often forget to charge it. This, I've learned, makes it lock itself into emergency mode, which is impossible to get out of without, I've also learned, removing the back, taking out the SIM card and re-inserting it. Major problem here is I'm unable to get the back off by myself (!) and have to take it into a Radio Shack to ask for help.


This past weekend, after a week of carting around an unusable phone, I took the miserable object down to New York, where my apartment is three doors away from a Radio Shack, intending to get the thing back into service. I was being met at Boston South Station on my return on Monday morning, and after my experience in Madrid when I was twelve hours late and had no way of getting that information to my sister who was meeting me in Malaga, had no desire for a repeat of that experience.


The fly in the ointment, or the perfection of the Saturn opposed to Mercury aspect, was that I left the phone's charger in Cambridge, so even with the back taken off and the Sim card reinserted, the battery still wasn't charged and the phone put itself back into emergency mode only. (Exactly what this is I have yet to find out; maybe it will only make a call to 911? To say what? "Excuse me, can you lend me a charger for my phone?")


To make a long and boring story short ("Too late," the ghost of  George S. Kaufman whispers in my ear), the only choice, if I wanted to be able to communicate, and I did,  was to shell out $40 for the cheapest new phone in the store - AT.& T's version of the Tracfone. The Lord of Karma strikes again.