Looking Forward

While working too long this weekend on a job that is likely to invite me to leave if I don’t agree to move to North Carolina for a reduced salary, I mused that so many people including me want to know what’s coming up next.

Victorian Trade Card Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

One of my clients has to know if a $100 investment would pay off because they really need the money. I hesitate to pull a card on that. Am I chicken or is it too much like financial advice, something specifically I won’t give, partly because of the day job and partly because of basic ethics: I’m not a professionally trained financial adviser? I pull a card. What a relief! It’s the Wheel of Fortune.

“It’s a crap shoot,” I tell my client. “Timing is everything.”

The $100 is a membership to be considered for work in a specific industry, the sales equivalent of buying leads, betting on some percentage of outcome based on your skills…and luck. I flash on Groucho Marx’ remark that he didn’t want to belong to an organization that would have him as a member. Something about that fits here, but can’t quite put my finger on it.

Knowing my client, they are going to do what they want to do anyway. It’s a free-will thing. I’m a big fan of free will. Little enough is up to us the way things are. I don’t like to see people give up their right to choose. My client doesn’t want to waste time and money on a fruitless venture. I sympathize, but I also think that when you focus on just one kind of fruit, you’re probably frustrated a lot. Maybe “fruitless ventures” are there to help us with some larger purpose.

Getting the Wheel of Fortune here at least validates my hesitation to say whether this will be a good deal or a bad deal. It’s a maybe yes, maybe no answer that maybe masks the real answer of there’s no sure thing in this life. That doesn’t keep any of us from wishing there were a sure thing.

People who are really good at what they do wish for a merit-based arrangement. The best should get what they deserve. People who suffer even a moment’s self-doubt wish for a stroke of undeserved good fortune. People want good things to happen for themselves and their loved ones. Sometimes good things happen; sometimes they don’t. And sometimes people who do what I do get an inkling of whether or not something will be a good thing. I don’t know why or how.

I don’t necessarily feel the need to attribute it to divine gift or the influence of evil, either, no more so than breathing, seeing, liking butter or being allergic to mold is a gift or a curse. It’s just a thing and, well, since I’m an optimist, I tend to think of all those things as some kind of gift. It takes less energy to say thank you than it does to spend time cursing. So, thanks, You Out There, just in case you intended my life to have these gifts and, well, thanks, too, if it’s just some accident.

I live in earthquake country in addition to wine country, agreeable weather country and any other description you might need. Because of that, I check out the USGS Earthquake site for recent activity, mostly because it interests me. While finishing up my degree in English, I nearly switched my major to geology, having become enamored of large systems and long-term cause and effect. In the end, I took a few geology courses and decided I needed the degree in the low-hanging fruit so I could get out into the workaday world. I still think it’s cool, though, that while people focus on, say, the devastating 1906 earthquake in San Francisco perhaps not realizing that what was really devastating was the resultant fire, unnoticed by most is that in the very few years (emphasis on very if you count geological time) around that event, there were major earthquakes all over the world. When it comes to plate tectonics, it basically works like that children’s song where all the piggies are in bed and they all rolled over and one fell out. It’s all connected, this earth, in a pattern larger than the burning of a city.

Of course, if the fire burned down your house, you’re going to focus on your immediate issue. If an entire economy is experiencing “piggy rolling” and you lose your job, you’re going to focus on that. You should. But larger patterns are likely in play, too. Sometimes the larger pattern is easier to see than the immediate effect; sometimes, the immediacy is all you can see. Reading cards can be like that too.

I have just as strong an urge to know what’s coming up as anyone else. So how can I be relieved that my reading for my client basically came up with, “It’s a crap shoot” for an answer? Maybe it’s because I’ve been working so hard on the microcosm all weekend, trying to get something done for Monday morning that in the grand scheme of things is not likely to prevent war, save homeless people or pets or cure even a case of the hiccups. But sometimes, it can be a comfort to focus on what’s right under your nose instead of being buried in the avalanche of what is to come.

What I do know is that I don’t want my client to be dependent on me as a card reader to be the determining factor of what they do in their lives. That’s my client’s responsibility, the burden, the obligation of free will.

The words we’re all searching for are “thank you”.

Best wishes.

Seeing With New Eyes

Taking a fresh look at things doesn’t always help us understand the past. One of my pet peeves, although it’s turned into a pet amusement over the years since being peeved gives entirely too much energy to something trivial, is a tendency to pluck events or people or artifacts from history without considering the historical context.

Maybe it started with the whole long hair thing in the late 60’s. In my small town in New Mexico, not exactly the vanguard of cutting edge fashion, it was not unusual for the police to pull teen-aged boys over in their cars, ask them to step out and then give them a haircut, usually a buzz-cut or some variation of that. The citation was a Biblical one, that long hair was an abomination.

In my tender and passionate teen years, even I knew that the reason long hair was considered an abomination had nothing to do with whether a guy expressed his individuality (questionable, of course, as all teen fads are more herd mentality than individuation) or even his feminine side, but of course more to do with lice and the dearth of CVS pharmacies in Biblical times. Back then, I would probably have said Rexall pharmacies. And in a way, that’s just my point.

You might not know what a Rexall pharmacy was, or a Sprouse-Reitz or a Sambo’s or even a Five-and-Dime. If you didn’t live in the South, you wouldn’t know what a Piggly-Wiggly was or why hushpuppies are good. You might not know whether you would have preferred a Nehi Orange or a Nehi Grape, for instance. You might not have had a short Coke for a nickel or a tall one for a dime. Basically, you had to be there.

Older people are likely to tell younger people stories, not just because they remember them better than what they had for lunch yesterday, but because they have an awareness that things have changed. Lots of things have changed. In the time before cell phones and video games and the internet, kids played outside all summer until the sun set, often giving their parents a much-needed break in summer evenings. As long as they could hear you, they figured you were safe, even if you were fighting with each other. Like kids and even adults in every culture, every “advancement” of technology, we played with what we had available.

Out of context, “Ollie, Ollie, Oxen Free” and “Red Rover, Red Rover, send Marcia right over!” mean about as much as an alien language. Were you really going to throw a ball all the way over a house? Would the child summoned break through “enemy” lines?

One of my Facebook friends recently bought an old whist deck and was looking for rules for whist, wondering if anyone played any more. As it turns out, there are many variations on the game of whist. While commuting on the ferry to San Francisco and back, I played bid whist with a booth full of pals. A book I purchased recently has the rules to many card games with a little historical background, just scratching the surface, but it lists the huge number of whist variations.

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” becomes more interesting when the child’s rhyme is found to be a not-terribly-well-disguised political statement about religious persecutions during the reign of Mary Tudor. Suddenly, “with silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row” sounds a lot creepier than jumprope. Yet, often the frustrations, anger and sorrow of a culture can be hidden in a game or child’s rhyme, something to soften the blow, something to remind people of what happened, something to put a little bookmark in the page of history so people can cope with the impact of a sudden change or terrible event.

Out of context, of course, Mary Mary seems like something of a funny nonsense rhyme and if context is lost it loses its irony and cultural significance.

One of my favorite Irish tunes, “The Last Rose of Summer,” sounds sweet and nostalgic until you find out they are talking about the high infant mortality rate during famine times. How do you soften the blow of the loss of a child, many children? All her lovely companions are faded and gone.

Robert Place and Rachel Pollack are working together on an oracle deck that I’m eager to purchase when it comes out. Two fine minds of Tarot and cartomancy like theirs, combining Bob’s artistry and diligent research along with Rachel’s writing talent and understanding of spiritual symbology (it’s hard to pin down what these two are best at because they are so terribly good at so many things), are creating a stunning joint effort called The Burning Serpent Oracle. Bob and Rachel are meticulous in their research and truly have considered the context of their study. It's one of the things I value most about them, where others may not have been so strict in their facts.

As part of Bob’s ongoing research into Tarot and Lenormand, he has delved into some of the roots that take us to earlier times than late-14th century northern Italian provinces, into the games of “Goose” and its more ancient ancestors in chase games. Chase games are the kinds of board games most of us are used to where we generally roll dice or spin a wheel or some randomized number representing our turn and advance and take the consequences, good or bad, for where we have landed. It’s a chase game because whoever gets to the end first is usually the winner. Winning, itself, may have its ramifications, too.

The Wheel of Fortune in Tarot is that kind of spinning wheel. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. It seems like things go in cycles of want and plenty. The lowly rise to fame and fortune. The mighty fall from grace. Sometimes it can seem like a game, a roulette wheel of entertainment; sometimes, the spin of the wheel means everything you have.

There’s speculation that an artifact from ancient times may be an early form of just such a game. It’s tantalizing to think that such a thing could have survived. We think of Archaeology with capital letters so often and expect the Finding of Important Artifacts. Growing up in my mother’s antique shop, I realized that the things most likely to survive and to be stumbled upon are the jumble of everyday life, the stuff in the back of your top dresser drawer. You don’t throw it away and when you get rid of the dresser, you probably don’t even clean it out. How often when you move from one residence to the next do you find that the last thing left in your old place is a bunch of coat hangers? They have no great importance but in their small way they signal something.

So I wanted to show you the Phaistos Disk, courtesy of Bob Place, plus a little extra fun that I’ve added. We don’t know what the disk means, whether it was a game or something extremely important. There are hieroglyphs on the disk, pictures that seem familiar, but without their temporal and cultural context are a bit of a mystery. And with the disk, I provide my irreverent cultural misidentification of what’s really going on here by applying a too-modern point of view.

Best wishes!

Happy New Year

The Mayan Apocalypse wasn’t a total bust. I had to get up early on Friday, December 21, 2012 to fill in for one of my east coast co-workers watching data update. If this sounds like watching paint dry, you’ve got the right idea. I’ve been fortunate to have few days in the last year or so where I had to get up before the birds, so I didn’t mind filling in for a couple of days to see the dawn and babysit batch.

Seeing the dawn was a fabulous treat, too. Not only do I miss it most days, but the Winter Solstice sunrise was a spectacular show. Usually mornings in northern California are foggy and grey, something like a soft flannel blanket covering the day so that we can adjust to things gradually. The cat still has all his stripes. My desk still needs to be cleaned off. You don’t want to be faced with every detail in sharp relief all at once. Usually, by the time you’ve had your second cup of coffee (preferably Peets or Thanksgiving Songbird coffee when I have coffee, but Starbucks in a pinch), you can see if there will be any blue sky showing through and perhaps a bit of afternoon sunshine. You don’t want to be ambushed by mornings in northern California. You want to get to know them gradually, like your mother told you about the guys you dated.

December 21, 2012 was hyped pretty heavily although most of what I saw was quite tongue-in-cheek. No one I know in the tarot or fringe communities I visit actually thought there were going to be asteroid attacks or other planet-ending events. We’ve all been shaken by recent events like the hurricane and the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy and the ensuing debate over whether it should be guns or mentally ill people who should be registered. I pray for kindness and relief of suffering, myself. It’s a small thing, my prayers, but in spite of their size relative to the issues, I still send them out.

In a Far Side kind of way, I wonder, if the dinosaurs had had adequate 4G connectivity, would they have been wiped out? So many people think that having advance notice of an event will help stave it off. That’s one of the hardest things about my work as a tarot reader. I have to explain that knowing things ahead of time may allow you to pack an umbrella, but it doesn’t stop the storm.

I don’t mean to say that having dawn break on Mayan Apocalypse day was a disappointment, either. I was happy it did but just about as happy as any other morning. The alarm sounded. I cursed my Blackberry for its cheeriness, grabbed it and tried to shut it off. It wanted my password, the new one I created yesterday. Fine time to ask me a question like that!

I realized that I didn’t have my glasses on so all the buttons looked like r’s, sort of. I groped the bedside avalanche for my glasses and after a few tries I found them. With the keyboard in better, not best focus, I turned off the alarm. Even though I knew the emails from the batch jobs I had to support at this uncivilized hour were not going to show up on the Small Screen, I looked, hoping something had changed technically that would allow me to stay under the layers of quilts and blankets next to the warm and fuzzy husband and dog who snored undisturbed by the alarm sounding.

Victorian Trade Card Tarot
(c) Copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

No. I had to get up and go into the office. At least it is just the room on the other side of the bathroom.

I don’t know about you, but when I get up in the morning, I’m a lot more like a typical northern California morning. I wake up gradually. First, there’s the fog thing. I mean between my ears. I get the thinking or speaking version of myself but not both. And then there’re the eyes. In spite of the assistance of corrective lenses, usually I get one eye to work while the other one sleeps in. It’s stuff like this that makes me completely against video-conferencing for work. I need to spare others the horror. When both eyes work, I may pass a mirror and realize my hair is a lop-sided Big Bird thing that won’t be tamed until gravity and some serious brushing or combing happens.

Padding into the office, I sat at my desk and looked at my laptop for those emails that won’t show up on the Blackberry. Batch was humming along, a little late but no worse than it has been for a month or so. Good. No work apocalypse either. I got sucked into the vortex of answering questions from east coast co-workers and then looked up.

The sky was red! I looked over at my home computer to watch any messages flying by there. A Facebook friend joked about the bright red sky, “It’s happening! It’s happ,” and simulated being cut off mid-syllable. There were responses about sneakers smoking with dry ice, corrections about rapture not being the same as The End. All the while, the sky was a glorious blaze as the sun came up.

This is unusual here. Granted, I do attempt to sleep through many a sunrise, but the ones I see are golden, not red. There’s the old rhyme, Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. Somehow, the sun sneaked a Pink Floyd-worthy laser show in under the cloudbank for us early birds.

“John, wake up,” I rushed in to make sure he didn’t miss the pretty sky. He wakes up in stages, too, and wandered into the kitchen.

“Wow, it’s red in here.” The kitchen has a lot of windows that let east and south sunlight in. I went back to my office to tend to the batch jobs, still humming along. I checked some reports. Yup, looks like sales data came in for the day. I looked out my office window.

“Oh, kitty!” I breathed to Tony who was purring on the desk, observing the vacant bird feeder and branches waving in the morning breeze.

“A rainbow!”

The red sky sunrise had caught the morning fog-drizzle at just the right angle to make a great rainbow to the west. It lasted so long that I wasn’t sure I was still awake. My friend Kaye posted some pictures from her house of the rainbow in all its colors. Good, I wasn’t dreaming after all. As quickly as it had appeared, the color faded and became a typical winter morning again.

The Wheel of Fortune in Tarot reminds us that no matter what we do, time keeps going, whirling us into the future. The old year is gone; the new one is ahead. The Mayan Long Count Calendar ran out and just as I told my friends so did my 2012 calendar. I’ve started my 2013 calendar and even have a booking for a tarot party! While the wheel of time keeps turning, there are special moments, special to you. Savor, cherish, indulge in the now of those moments. Each one is special. Each one is unique.

Even if each moment isn’t December 21, 2012 when the earth, the sun and the center of the Milky Way Galaxy line up in the great Galactic Alignment that the Mayans noted for this date, because they did get something astronomical astoundingly right with their Long Count (disputed, of course), you can line up your life to make the best of each moment for this coming year and years to come.

Best wishes!

Chasing the Wheel

One of the versions of the Merlin and King Arthur story is that not only was Merlin a wizard, he lived his life backwards. He started out as an old and wise wizard emerging from the magical hills, advised Uther Pendragon, then taught Uther's young son Arthur, hidden away, how to be the once and future king. At the end of his time, Merlin fell giddily in love with a woman who loved him for what he knew and what he was, but perhaps not who he was. He made a young man’s mistake, chasing after beauty and things on the surface after a lifetime of being a visionary of the depths.

His sense of time was different from the rest of the world and yet his job as spiritual, magical, moral and even athletic coach to young Arthur was to teach the king the importance of seizing a moment in time. Sometimes, like Arthur, we have one chance to do the right thing.

In the legend of Arthur, the once and future king, Arthur dies. Or does he? He is taken to the misty Isle of Avalon apparently mortally wounded. He tried to show the local “kings” that working together was more beneficial than fighting each other. By giving those in local power an equal place at his round table, he indicated to them that he would exercise no positional power over them. By granting them dignity, respect, affirmation, acceptance and their own voices, and by appealing to their sense of honor, he allowed them to believe with him that Right Makes Might.

Yet, also in the legend, old mistakes, however brief or blameless, came back to haunt Arthur. Merlin tried to help, but by then he was in his youthful indiscretion, no longer the wise old wizard who had changed young Arthur to a fish so he could learn to swim or to a bird so that he might fly. The wheel of time had turned and it was a time of change.

Arthur was taken, wounded, to Avalon. Merlin was frozen in a cave. An important theme, no matter which version of the Arthur story you like, is that once there was a time when the imperfect world of human beings actually worked. It worked until it didn’t. Another theme is that Arthur will return. The other thought, although it is seldom mentioned, is that Merlin is likely to return too. Maybe we'll get a second chance.

From the way our world works now, sometimes I think we could both of them. A returning hero with his wise counselor-magician, both cured of their human vulnerabilities, would be a nice change of pace. If only it were so easy.

Dealing with change is never easy. And yet, that wheel is always moving. There are some days when I hate all surprises, even good ones. But the Wheel of Fortune refers to larger changes in our lives, not the little surprises.

The planet Saturn is entering Scorpio again. Saturn’s path goes in 29 year cycles. Think of your birthday each year as your “solar return.” The Sun returns to approximately the spot where it was the day you were born. Of course, this movement is relative and the earth spins and goes around the sun and not the other way around. But in an astrological sense, the sun comes back to you, your spot, each year. Each of the planets—yes, I feel sorry for Pluto because he got demoted—takes its own amount of time to pass through the Zodiac. The Moon moves fastest, then Mercury, etc. Instead of a year, like the Sun, Saturn takes 29 years.

Not to give away too much information for you arithmetically inclined, but I’m approaching my Saturn return. It makes me thoughtful. In my chart, Saturn isn’t particularly a bad thing. It says that older people have been kind to me (true) and while I may not have had as much sponsorship or mentoring as I wanted, it has made me used to living without supervision. Well, being fairly self-reliant has worked for me in many ways, although I clearly admit to loving being spoiled by The Hubs!

When the horoscopes say that I may find myself without some of the support structures I’ve been used to, that’s a characteristic of Saturn in Scorpio. So, in looking at the events in my life that happened when I was born and when I was 29, I try to get an idea what my Saturn return has in store for me.

For instance, I was “accidentally” born at home. I was a couple of weeks early. Dad had flown to California for his Pentagon job, something to do with the Air Force and housing and bases and such. My brother was at the babysitter’s and Mom was alone in our home in the D.C. metro area. Apparently things happened very quickly and in spite of the benefits of civilization and modern medicine, Mom and I had our first mother-daughter do-it-yourself project together. Mom never let Dad forget it either. When I think about it, I’m pretty glad I played the role of the baby in this drama. The other roles were a lot tougher.

“Did you pick me up by my feet and spank me?” I asked, thinking of Butterfly McQueen in Gone With The Wind. No, I did my own little throat-clearing and breathed on my own. So many things could have gone wrong. Better to be lucky than good, The Hubs says.

When I was 29, my mother died. She was 42 when I was born and had lived my entire childhood in terror of dying before I was officially out of the nest. Once I did leave the nest, she was really upset that I had. No, REALLY upset. But since her illness was long and awful, we had had plenty of time to talk, just never enough time. She was in the hospital with no special measures requested and we went to see her. That time, that last moment when we talked, that was like no other. She knew I would be forever unsupervised now and we finally agreed I would probably be OK. I didn’t care about that then. I just wanted to talk to her and have her talk to me. We let each other go.

Now, at my second Saturn return approaching, comically coincidental with the end of the Mayan Calendar, I learned today that my boss was let go. His position was eliminated in that awful “nothing personal” thing companies do when they say thank-you and good-bye. He and I had had a rocky start to our relationship with vastly different approaches to management. He was what many call a micro-manager which so many talented, intelligent workers despise as an insult to all that they are. Saturn is the School of Hard Knocks, the Hard Lesson, Tough Love. When an earlier organizational change had me reporting to him, I took it as an opportunity to learn how to let go of the ego of being a talented, intelligent worker and just concentrate on doing a good job, learning new things, being kind and trying to bring sanity to the workplace. We ended up working well together.

More than the loss of my boss, my vice president made a huge decision to move to a different company so he could spend more time with his family. It’s likely that more changes are coming.

I can bark at this wheel turning, this Wheel of Fortune with its ups and downs, like my first husband’s family dog who chased Volkswagens on their street. BeBe chased until one day she caught one! She rolled around the wheel well while we all screamed in horror. Just that fast she was spat out behind the bug, running around in circles and still barking, completely unhurt. But BeBe never chased cars again.

The wheel of change is going to happen whether I “bark” or not. It’s going to be easier if I adjust quickly, without anger or fear, and adapt to the new circumstances. Of course, it will be just like two Saturns ago. Just take a breath.

Best wishes.

Overload

 I’ve been having those 10 of Wands days at work lately. Basically, there is just too much going on. When you work on a complex software system, there are a lot of moving parts. Coming down from Easter, that fun family wedding and that not-fun death in the family, I feel a bit like I got my skirt caught in the Wheel of Fortune and took a few unexpected spins, even hitting my head on the ground a couple of times on my way around.

I’m about ready for a few days of sitting in a corner, sucking my thumb and hugging my blankie. I don’t have to draw any cards to figure out that that particular refuge is not my destiny for a few weeks at least.

Usually I figure if I’m in a tornado, well, let’s make it a good tornado experience. So things like standing in line or sitting in slow traffic usually don’t bother me too much. I usually make friends in the line or to my further amusement don’t make friends. I’ll sing songs, consider the possibilities of driving a different car, try to say what I’m seeing in French or Spanish or German or maybe even Pig-Latin, none of which I speak fluently while stuck in traffic or any other time for that matter.

At a couple of recent tarot classes, we’ve discussed the concept, the possibility of clearing your mind and being still for minutes at a time. Generally I think I would want to try, say, 5 seconds and work my way up. And yet, when I read tarot, I’m somehow able to reach a clear spot in my head, like a meadow in the woods or a remote stretch of beach. Then I can read from there. But just doing the exercise? Stillness? It’s a goal.

Weird, I think, how I can have a seldom-still mind and yet sense the feeling of overload only rarely. I can do a lot of visual multi-tasking. I can’t hear more than one “track” at a time, however. I know one person who is amazing at being able to listen to multiple conversations at the same time, but in my opinion he is an anomaly.

 My workplace took a big uptick in volume recently. One of my directors assigned a particularly sticky project that was about to take a wrong turn. She also decided that it would be better to have all projects about new products and their impact on the systems in my area go through me. My immediate supervisor decided that it would be good if I was in charge of all the defects found in the software.

There is some extra administrative process that goes along with all of this and it translated to my workload expanding rapidly by about four times. Then an emergency project came up for another group and they gave me some of the items already in progress from that group, including one “hot potato” that is problematic. I know it sounds strange to say I got a problem that was itself a problem. I would explain, but as you can see, I don’t have time.

I asked my co-worker who had owned the hot potato I was relieving her of to meet with me for turnover. When you are handed something really exciting that is in danger of going south, it is essential to get the low-down, the skinny, the back story. Just a little bit of TLC in the handoff makes things go smoothly. We met.

“Hey, thanks for meeting with me. Can you catch me up on what’s up with this issue?”

She said yes and referenced an email thread.

“Right,” I said. “I read through it. It seems pretty convoluted.”

“Yes,” she said. “In that email thread, where you see my name, put your name. That’s the turnover.” And that was it.

I was dumbfounded. It was the most blatant case of Fling-It-Over-the-Fence-and-Run I had experienced in a long time. There was a meeting scheduled later that day. This “turnover” was supposed to have prepared me for that meeting. I decided to wait for that meeting. Maybe I have “one-track ears” but I learn a lot in meetings. In the context of that conversation, I expected I would be able to put at least some of the puzzle pieces together.

Naturally, the meeting later that day made things worse instead of better. I took notes. And I quickly shot off a note to my boss to let him know that the "turnover" I received was insufficient and quoted the instructions I had received that morning. He agreed another meeting was needed, to my relief. My co-worker was clearly irritated. She told me to submit my questions in advance.

“I have just one,” I said, gently as I could. “What would you want to know about this if you were in my place with no background about the issue, the project, the constraints, etc.?”

We met the next day. What a change! I was able to take notes that translated to a coherent description of the issue and the next steps. I asked questions for clarity. I wrote a summary of the meeting and shared it with my co-worker and boss. My co-worker added even more critical information than she had provided during either of our two meetings. I thanked her.

I added my new stick to the bundle on my back, juggled them as best I can. I made quite a bit of headway today on the hot potato, the projects I had before I was gifted with all the extras, the bug list, the products, the testing, the discussions with the business partners, even providing some unexpected emergency advice to another department in distress. I downloaded and tried two new utilities to view a very large file without much luck, then figured out some alternatives with the help of some more technical folks. I was able to do some in-depth analysis that pointed to, alas, a problem.

Bring in the torch and pitchfork people, the Teflon, the sleight of hand and even the finger-pointing between two technology areas. I provided as much information as I could and let them talk it through among themselves. I moved to other project tasks, another stick in the bundle, two sticks, five.

It’s a game of beat the clock. We’re screaming down the avalanche trail towards our release weekend. My sled has just a few too many sticks in it right now. I’m weighted down by my burden. I feel like the ant and the rubber tree plant. Sometimes that weight slows me down. Sometimes it keeps me on the trail as I trudge along. See, once the software release is complete, we will start this all over again. And, yes, I am happy I have a job.

I am also happy Readers Studio 2012 is very soon. I will be glad for the break.

Best wishes.

In the Pool

After picking the Super Bowl loser a couple of years in a row, I officially retired from sports picks with Tarot. But my husband convinced me otherwise. We are members of the GVMNFPEADS. OK, not every organization has a catchy acronym, but this one has been in existence for a long time. That’s a very long time, somewhere around 30 years, maybe more. (Children, please! Put away your calculators. These people have youthful ideas in spite of the cold, hard numbers. Besides, it's not nice to be rude to old people.)

I’m actually a newbie to the pool, whose official name is the Greater Vallejo Monday Night Football Pool Eating and Drinking Society. I’ve only been associated with the pool for the last 16 years. It was a little awkward breaking in as the new kid. In fact, when John brought me to the first football pool dinner, I had no idea that the members thought I was a kid. I figure it’s because I don’t have many wrinkles.


Tea Tarot
(c) Copyright 2011 Marcia McCord


My friend B. G. says you can’t have an unwrinkled face and a tiny derriere at our age. Well, it’s not like I wanted to be “plush sized” but if the side benefit is being mistaken for John’s “cradle robbee” then I guess it’s OK. Let’s just say I’m not as young as a lot of people think I am. Then again, I’d say I was much younger! One year I started dropping comments revealing my age so people would relax, for goodness’ sake. Over time, the poolies and I have gotten to know each other a bit and I don’t feel like I’m treated like both the blonde and the little red sportscar all rolled into one. I don’t think of myself as my husband’s midlife crisis, but more like the cure for it. They probably do get that between the two of us, the dog provides the only adult supervision in the house.

So, when Ricky Rasputin, our illustrious organizer, sent out the Week 1 picks sheet, I considered long and hard before playing along. There’s a little history of course. About three years ago, I decided to take the pool seriously. You know what I mean: Study. I read the newspapers, listened to the pundits, figured the point spreads, even threw in a favorite color or mascot into the mix for fun. I submitted my selections faithfully, writing role-playing emails to RickyRasp posing as the Faithful Servant to Mindless Leader of the Sunless World.

Even the role-playing has history. My husband spent two years in India in the Peace Corps and returned for a few visits, once as a Fulbright Scholar. Pardon me for bragging but I think that’s pretty cool. After all, at the same approximate age, I was still trying to referee my parents’ fights, teach junior college courses in collecting antiques and get a second college degree, this time in a marketable skill. I can’t call going to Missouri exotic travel, especially when I started from Illinois. Refereeing my parents’ fights died off as a calling when my mother was diagnosed with cancer and decided not to fight with anyone any more. At least I got to spend some quality time with her before she died. And I don’t think I saved the neighborhood from my parents’ quarrels since by then they were good at keeping them within household and decibel boundaries, refining the process over time.

So, back to the hubs. While he was in India, one of the people he worked with there thanked him for his efforts to bring sunshine to the sunless world. It transformed over time to be an official title of the Mindless Leader of the Sunless World. So when we got together, I became the Faithful Servant, the scribe for our little kingdom and Mindless' right hand.  Maybe left too. As you can imagine, appealing to Ricky Rasputin requires a certain decorum. You can’t just say, “Here ya’ go!”

Week after week, I studied and submitted the picks, beseeching Ricky Rasputin to accept the humble efforts of the unworthy scribe. Week after week, our collective score sank like a stone to the inglorious position of next-to-last. If we had been last, we would at least have gotten the prize for being the worst.

Alternatively, our friend Maxine basically threw a dart at the wall and submitted all her picks at the beginning of the season at random and finished a teeth-gnashing above-average. Fie! Phooey! Fine. Other f-words came to mind, few of them football. So the last two years, we’ve signed up for the pool but not submitted any picks, watched our friends’ fortunes rise and fall throughout the NFL season, hosted our requisite GVMNFPEADS dinner on the Monday night we signed up for and just enjoyed everyone’s company.

There are a few poolies who have passed on, one in particular a retired doctor originally from the Boston area, who would have snorted at the idea of just enjoying everyone’s company. But Rocky adored my husband and was delightful with me, something not everyone can say. Rocky and his sunny wife Kay served us dinner most Thursday nights until they became too infirm to do so. Now they are both angels in heaven.  At least Kay is.  But Rocky was serious about his football. I’m not sure he would appreciate that we were just as serious about our socializing with the pool and its other extraordinary members.

We’ve had a judge, a couple of doctors, teachers, civil servants, politicians, other medical professionals, a roofer, a former merchant marine, the gardening experts, the flooring folks, sales, service and the humane society people in the pool. This is a fun bunch of people dedicated to good food and good football. They are world travelers. They are organizers. They are promoters. They are movers and shakers. They are people like anyone else trying to get along.

So this year, after a little prompting, I’ve decided I would dip a toe into submitting my picks, using, of course, the Tarot! No analysis, this time, no serious studying of the sports section or calculation of odds or factoring in injuries. Nope, just the Tarot this time. Each week, I’ll post the picks on a separate page here in my blog which I’ve named Mr. Goon’s Sports Page. Each team gets a card for the game it plays that week. Pitted against its opponent’s card, they will duke it out Tarot-style. The games will be ranked based on whether their card pair comparisons look like a sure thing (high point values) down to the hard to tell games (low point values).

OK, boys, let’s spin that Wheel of Fortune! I’ll let you know how I do.

Best wishes.

In 10’s

I don’t pretend to be able to write in “text message” speak but from what I can gather it’s a lot like an entire book condensed to the size of a license plate. My best guess is that the severe abbreviations were born out of necessity as text messages have a maximum length much shorter than a graphic novel and suit the nano-minded young ‘un’s level of patience and concentration. Most texters seem to be those whom we slower, older folk diagnose, rightly or wrongly, as the ADHD crowd. We oldsters, so many of us having fallen prey to the idealist Liberal Arts educational opportunities of our time, may also take a moment to despair of the deterioration of the English language in general and spelling in the specific. The root of the difference is at least accurate: the whippersnappers go faster than we ageless beauties and revived virtuosos do.



Art Postcard Tarot
(c) copyright 2010 Marcia McCord



My last couple of weeks, especially the weekends, have been really action packed and intense. In text lingo I think that would translate to “in 10’s” and perhaps stereotypically and a bit behind the times would be expressed as “in 10’s, dude.” This time, though, there is recognizable connection between my intense last few days and the 10’s in the tarot. My tens in tarot are the Wheel of Fortune and the Tens of Cups, Wands, Pentacles and Swords.

The Wheel of Fortune makes me aware of the passage of time and its effects, for good or ill. Some days you’re the windshield; some days you’re the bug. The passage of time can be all too fast. I was just getting used to thinking of my friend Sandy as a mother of three and just this week her third grandchild was born. It’s a girl! (Toss the flower petals now.) Some things just seem to sneak up on you. When the wheel spins, you can land up or down and it’s so lovely to have some happy news to celebrate. Welcome, little Sophia!

That wheel can spin a little too slowly, too, as in: When am I ever going to get rid of this cold? I mean I’m grateful -- grateful, truly-- that my symptoms are nothing like last month’s torture on the rack with the flu. This cold, though, is like static cling, the cat urine of viruses that will not wash out no matter what remedy is applied. It’s evil, I tell you. Just when I think I’m feeling better, a whole new wave of congestion and explosive expletive/cough/sneeze/choke combinations come at the most inopportune time.



Art Postcard Tarot
(c) copyright 2010 Marcia McCord



“How are you feeling?” asks my Nordic goddess chiropractor. “Oh, fine,” I lie and barely spit out the words before I’m red-faced and purple eyed with a new seizure of viral noises that would scare dragons away from their caves. “Fine,” I gasp, finally able to get my breath again. Really? Really?

I may have spent the afternoon at work with relative ease of airways but the moment I step into a social situation where I least want to share my most intimate Velcro of a virus, there I go, sneep, snort, hork, choke, gargle, honk and finally, with a swipe of the ever-present tissue, sniff. Yep, I’m ready to put the ol’ 10 of Swords in this baby, cut this microbe off at the knees. OK, cut it off at the molecule. Whatever. I’m done. Quick, Henry, the Flu Flit or whatever viral insecticide will pounce on this thing like the Glee Lady’s limo cat’s story about the cat crushing the mouse. I want to sleep through the night, breathe through my nose and have an adult conversation about any topic other than over-the-counter cures.



Art Postcard Tarot
(c) copyright 2010 Marcia McCord



So in spite of this liar, this cheat of a germ, which fools me into thinking I’m “better today” and thus leads me to make commitments for evenings and weekends only to break them or (is it worse yet?) to keep them, I drag my aching ribs and flame-red nose to share.

The unreliability of my breathing and sudden onset of symptoms with little or no warning, however, has made me appreciate at least one thing so much more. My husband’s sister loves to watch American Idol, so when she visits we revel in the contestants, an affliction my husband does not share. One of this year’s stand-outs is a young man from nearby Santa Cruz, James Durbin, who has Tourette’s Syndrome. I am encouraged that if he is able to sing so well when his body may have other ideas, surely I should be able to overcome a cold. Right? He made it to the Top 10, surely a 10 of Cups dream for him and his happy family and friends. Now if only I can start breathing without my nose running.



Art Postcard Tarot
(c) copyright 2010 Marcia McCord



Tens are about endings and beginnings, so I’ve got the 10 of Pentacles going too. We’re putting the finishing touches on some financial items especially the annoying paperwork all too common in tax season. We’re working on planning my husband’s family reunion this summer and I feel the details of the preparation for that starting to sneak up on me like hungry ghosts. I wonder if my friend Erica could do crowd shots during the event and, hey, maybe set up a little booth and make a little extra. Add to that the screech of a few unfinished projects lying around that I really do want to complete, plus a quick deep (we’re talking ‘way deep here) dive into numerology using The Connolly Book of Numbers, volumes I and II. These are likely beyond my tolerance for the esoteric (can I be a tarot reader and say that??) but I identified the insufficiency in my own understanding to the point where I could not ignore it. So in I dove. I have a lot of 3’s (off topic, I know) and I like that. 3’s are creative and friendly. And apparently easily distracted. Hmm, maybe I used to be one of those nano-children. Or that’s contagious, too. Back to that pile of unfinished projects.

To top it all off, I’ve been busy at both the Day Job and tarot reading. With the Day Job, if it’s not one thing, it’s about 10. That fits, right? Where are all these people and their projects coming from? My status report is starting to look like the 10 of Wands, not that I want to complain that I’m overloaded. Nope, I’m bearing up bravely. Watch me grit my teeth. Oh, right, the dentist says I’m not supposed to grit my teeth any more. Sure, I’ll take care of that just as soon as I’m done with my cold!

Art Postcard Tarot
(c) copyright 2010 Marcia McCord

And happily, along with the bundle of too much going on, is a sudden uptick in my tarot reading, both at the shops I haunt and elsewhere. I’m teaching classes, I volunteered for the 3rd Annual Witches Ball in Benicia dressed in fun costume no less and I’m making after hours appointments all over. I’m also looking forward to my big spring treat, going to the Readers’ Studio 2011 in New York next month. I made my reservations, got my flight figured out, remembered that the Cobb Salad was the best thing on the menu for the Aeclectic Tarot dinner that’s being organized and have a couple of fun new t-shirts to wear at the conference. I have to figure out how to pack my costume for the dress-up dinner without crushing the, well, it’s a surprise so I’m not telling. And just to make things even more fun, I’ve booked the Himalayan Festival in Berkeley and another peaceful walk among the songbirds with my bird-buddy Ronda in a class put on by the Pt. Reyes National Seashore Association.

OK, seriously, I am so done with this cold. Di, ynke grm!!!

Best wishes.