I don’t guide my life by my astrology charts, but I have to admit that I think there is some strange cosmic validity to Mercury in retrograde and the way that things get messed up during those times of the year. I think of it as planetary Murphy’s Law. Communications, paperwork and stuff that should just be simple to accomplish all go screwy.
A week ago on Friday, my iPhone blinked and when it returned, my phone contacts had vanished. I didn’t have my main laptop with me on my weekend jaunt to Miami so I had to wait until I returned home on Sunday in order to resynch my phone. Even then, because I am truly bad about remembering to back up my phone, I lost any numbers that I’d added since last June.
My brother recommended that I activate “The Cloud” to make a backup accessible from wherever. I truly meant to do that last week but I was formidably busy both at work and in the evenings. I thought I’d be fine and went about getting in touch with some colleagues and asking them to resend their phone numbers to I could replace the numbers that were still missing. In the meantime, the wind blew up around the Keys and, for reasons I am yet to figure out, that messed up my home Internet service. I couldn’t stay online for more than a few minutes at a time before the service would go out, reset, come back, go out, resent, come back, lather, rinse and repeat.
The long and short of this tale of woe is that yesterday, at almost the exact time as the previous week, when one factors in that we leapt forward an hour, my phone blinked again and my contacts once more disappeared. I called AT&T and then spoke with Apple. The only thing Apple could suggest was that I restore my phone as if new.
Last night was a long, drawn-out affair of resynching, then uploading to the Cloud (three hours!), then restoring the phone which also involved upgrading to the latest operating system and then synching back my contacts, apps, calendar, etc. etc. etc, blah, blah blah.
I persevered and everything appears to be fine. Let’s see if it remains so after 9:00 a.m. eastern time next Friday.
So what does all of this complaining have to do with my weighty matters? I had a really good food week last week with a steady weight loss, as you know. Then, beginning last night and continuing through to today I’ve had a consistent urge to snack. I also wanted more carbs and chocolate.
I do not think this is coincidental. It just goes to show that no matter how far I come and how much success I achieve in this journey, I still need to battle compulsive eating. As important is that I need to battle the things that trip my trigger. Stress is one of those trip wires.
When I think about it, it’s honestly ridiculous to let phone and communication challenges throw me off track. I’ve definitely been offline. Time to reboot, restore and resynch myself.
I’m not going to punish myself with stinking thinking, castigating myself for being human and fallible. I went to the supermarket tonight and bought “healthy” goods that are on my good plan. I’m already planning out the next few days of meals. Tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not planning to indulge in wild partying, although I am going to a local St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Actually, I’m walking in it. I’m on the Board of Directors for the organization that runs the local animal shelter. The executive director asked a few days ago for volunteers who were willing to come and walk some of the shelter dogs in the parade. The weather’s supposed to be really nice and I know this is a great opportunity to show off some of the animals that need to be adopted into new “furever” homes. I’ll walk my own pups in the morning for our mutual exercise, and then enjoy the parade stroll.
After, I’ll stop by one of the local restaurants for a quick bite of some corned beef and cabbage, but avoid the beer.
While my Irish friends and those who want to be Irish for the day connect with the holiday, I’ll reconnect with my journey and goals.
Weighty Matters 
If you need help sending your contacts to the cloud, let me know. 🙂
Argh about the phone! I had to get my hard drive reformatted and couldn’t find a file to recreate my address book, so I’m doing it a bit at a time. I had physical addresses in their too. Guess I need to have a paper address book, for just such times.
It’s cool that you are in the parade walking adoptable animals! Yay for you!
And yay for not giving in to the stress-cravings! You are strong and powerful and doing so well.
I hope you enjoy being in the parade.