Mercury, Malware, and the Year Already Galloping

Renee:

I’ve been telling a few people lately that this year already feels unusually intense.

And honestly, I’m not someone who typically leans too hard into Mercury retrograde conversations.

Usually, I feel pretty shielded from all that.

But 2026 has had a strange energy right out of the gate.

A little unpredictable. A little chaotic. A little… what now?

The other day, I was talking with Christina Hills, creator of “The Website Creation Workshop”, and she mentioned how unusual it is that WordPress has released four updates in such a short stretch.

Four!

She’s a WordPress expert, so when she said, “Make sure all your sites are fully updated,” I listened.

So I logged in to check.

And that’s when I discovered I couldn’t log in; four of my websites were unavailable.

Not slow.

Not glitchy.

Unavailable.

A deeper dive showed malware.

Four infected sites.

Mark:

There are moments in business when something quietly breaks in the background, and one person in the relationship immediately understands the implications.

This was one of those moments.

For me, it registered as:

“That sounds annoying.”

For Renee, it registered as:

“What exactly is broken, how bad is it, how long will this take, and are we about to lose years of work?”

Different nervous systems. Different lanes.

Renee:

Hosting support told me to contact my developer.

The problem is… I don’t have one.

I’ve always been the developer.

I’m the one who built the sites. Maintains them. Fixes things. Figures it out.

So hearing “contact your developer” felt almost funny.

Because the developer was sitting there at 3 a.m. trying not to spiral.

What hit me hardest was Mark’s site.

A full year of our blog lives there. 

All the reflections, stories, lessons, moments we’ve shared.

The thought of losing that honestly broke my heart.

Not because it couldn’t be rebuilt.

It could.

But what a project.

And what a loss of time.

Mark:

The interesting thing is, things like this don’t hit me the same way.

Not because I don’t care.

I do.

But tech has never lived in my nervous system the way it does in Renee’s.

When systems break, she immediately starts tracing every possible consequence.

I usually assume she’ll solve it.

Because she usually does.

And she did.

Renee:

What surprised me most was how quickly an old memory came back.

Years ago, when we were first starting our entrepreneurial journey, I built Mark’s very first website.

And then accidentally deleted it.

Completely.

I remember the sinking feeling.

The devastation.

Back then, every piece of what we were building felt fragile because it was.

I managed to recover it, but I still remember how shaken I was.

This week brought that exact feeling back for a moment.

Except now it wasn’t one website.

It was four.

And somehow the emotional response was the same:

Please don’t let years of work disappear.

Mark:

Business growth changes many things.

But one thing that doesn’t change is this:

Every season has its own version of uncertainty.

Early on, it’s obvious.

Later, it just wears different clothes.

Renee:

After multiple tech support chats, very little sleep, hiring an expert (thank you, Christina Hills, for the referral), and more hours than I planned to spend staring at hosting dashboards…

Everything is resolved.

No infection. No errors. No missing sites.

Back in business.

Maybe Mercury retrograde.

Maybe Fire Horse energy.

Maybe just entrepreneur life reminding me that even invisible systems need attention.

Either way…

This year definitely feels like it’s moving.

Renee & Mark:

Sometimes what looks small from the outside carries real weight behind the scenes.

A website. A system. A platform. A piece of work people never think about until it disappears.

And maybe that’s true in more of life than we realize.

The things quietly holding everything together matter more than most people see.