Linda L. Zern's Blog, page 5

Shopping Buggy Blues: Buggy, Cart, Trolley

When the cashier asked me, “Did you find everything okay?”

I said, “Sure, yeah, great! I found the toilet seat, dog dip, fire ant killer, and gas can—just great. I would be beside myself with shopping joy IF IT WASN’T FOR YOUR DERANGED BUGGIES!”

Then she called security.

Here in the south we call them buggies. If you’re a Yankee you may call them carts, and if you’re from England, you call them trolleys—which is just bizarre.

There are three types of buggies at Walmart: the ones that pull—to the left or the right, the ones that vibrate like the Space Shuttle during liftoff, and the ones that seize up on you, because it suspects that you are homeless and looking for a spare bedroom.

I watched my husband yank, pull, push, sway, and rock a Walmart buggy for seventeen minutes one day when we crossed the invisible buggy alert line. It froze up. He went berserk.

“It’s frozen,” I said. He yanked.

“The buggy thinks that you’re homeless,” I explained. He tipped, then rocked, and then shook it--all over.

“Face it; we’re going to have to carry eighty pounds of groceries from here to way out there.” I pointed. It was hard to see our vehicle. It was Christmas time. He growled.

The vibrator buggies are often easy to spot. These buggies are often abandoned at various points around the mega-store, due to the hideous clank, clank, clank noise they emit, and the tremors that travel up through the one wheel that is flapping free. That clanking noise travels through the handle, into the bones of your forearm, and finally into your temples—like an ice pick.

Occasionally, a small child will also be abandoned with the buggy. It’s a decoy. Don’t fall for it. When you go to assist the child, its mother will attempt to steal your buggy and collect the kid later at the lost and found.

The pullers are the worst. Hard to spot and apparently impossible to fix these buggies appear serviceable, but by the time you reach the detergent you will be nearing a state of exhaustion. The exhaustion stems from the constant over compensating you will be forced to do to keep your buggy from drifting into the buggy with the infant in it on your left or the woman in the hover-round on your right.

Tip: The more groceries in a puller the worse it pulls, and if a puller buggy gets away from you in the parking lot there may be no stopping it. Like a suicide bomber it will throw itself into the nearest and newest car in the parking lot.

Chasing after a runaway cart, screaming, is highly ineffective. Trust me on this.

Then there are the perfect buggies. The ones that neither pull, nor drift, nor rattle, nor seize up. A pleasure to push and a joy to load up, these buggies just roll along like a corny song, until you hit a bump and your eggs fall out onto the parking lot, but don’t break, and they (the eggs) go rolling—but not in a straight line, because unbroken eggs can’t roll in a straight line—every where, they roll just every which way, and because the eggs didn’t break you feel that you should catch them, because they’re still good. Right?

I mean you could still make brownies with them (if you cooked that is) and so you go running wildly through the parking lot chasing eggs, trying to get all your eggs in one basket, but in the end there’s no way that you’re going to crawl underneath that van dripping bio-hazards where three of your eggs have rolled, because there are things that you’ll do for brownies and then there are things that you won’t do, and that’s life.

Sometimes life pulls to the right or left, leaving you exhausted and sometimes it vibrates and shatters your eardrums. Sometimes life locks up on you, thinking that you’re someone else entirely, and sometimes life is just right--then the eggs fall out and roll away under a van.

Linda (Trolley Girl) Zern

Hobby Mowing - Here Comes Summer

It’s called hobby farming, and it’s a lot like hobby boating or hobby mountain climbing—money goes in but not much money comes out. We are hobby farmers. My husband is Lord of the hobby farm. I am a hobby farmer’s wife. 

He has a “real” job. I’m not sure what he does, but it involves gluing a lot of receipts to pieces of paper. He also travels. On the weekends, he rides his horse and practices finding dead people in the woods. It’s a volunteer posse thing.

If you’ve been a long time reader than you know that I have a tarnished reputation for being something of an unreliable farmhand. While I do a lot of farm chores, I often have bad luck—mostly while mowing.

On our first John Deere lawn tractor, I managed to pull a faucet right off the barn, jam the mower blade through a pine tree root, wrap a doormat around the deck, hit a dead bird carcass, catch the pulley’s on fire, hit a stump, bruise my liver, and run over the Comcast cable. (Please be advised this is not a complete list.)

My luck got so bad that we had to purchase a brand new John Deere lawn tractor (bigger, better, more.) It’s way cool. Or it was until I ran it into a stump with sticks that jammed into the grill of the lawnmower. Because of my bad luck, I had no idea that I was jammed. When I innocently backed up, still jammed, I ripped the lawnmower hood clean off. Bad luck.

My husband, the hobby farmer, does not believe that I have bad luck. He thinks that I am a menace to his wallet—also cursed—by gypsies.

I may be cursed, but he has a death wish.

My husband has never done a single farm chore without smashing, bashing, crushing, slicing, mangling, dislocating, or squashing one or more of his fingers. He often requires stitches. While loading field fence at Tractor Supply he jabbed wire into the soft bits between his fingers. It required six sutures.

He showed me the gaping hole and said, “What do you think? Will a butterfly bandage do it?”

“What’s the rule?” I asked patiently.

“If you can see fat, tendons, ligaments or internal organs it needs stitches.”

“Excellent.” I patted him on the head. “Hey, do you mind if I don’t go with you to the emergency room today. I’m really backed up on the mowing?”

When he got back from the emergency room he started in on the hedges with our brand new electric hedge trimmer and a hundred foot extension cord. He trimmed the hedges beautifully—also the extension cord. He trimmed that right down the middle. It’s the second one he’s chopped in half.

I observed, “Are you trying to electrocute yourself? Or are you trying to pioneer a poor man’s taser?”

“Since you’re going to Walmart, can you pick up another extension cord? Why are you going to Walmart anyway?”

“Duct tape, to tape the hood back on the lawnmower.”

“Right,” he said, pausing. “Get two, three rolls.”

“Right.”

Because in the end, there isn’t much that can’t be fixed with duct tape, including bad luck and double negatives.

Linda (Mow Hard, Mow Fast) Zern 

J is for Jacked as in Hijacked

FIND FANTASTICAL FUN @ 16Toadstonelane.com
AND NEAR-FUTURE APOCALYPTIC FIRE @ lindalzern.com


“Sherwood?” I asked. I thought I detected an eyeroll from my husband of forty plus years, but it was hard to tell. The weirdo lights from his fifteen computer screens have a strobing effect.“Yes?” He answered a question with a question.“You know how I’m going to the Space Coast Book Lovers extravaganza this coming summer, and they wanted to publish my website link, and I sent the link to them, but then when I checked the link to see if the link actually linked to stuff and it went to a strange website with wild Chinese writing and girls in boxes?”“Don’t click on anything.” He had not looked up from the strobing effect of his wall of computer screens.“Sherwood?”“Yes?”“I may have clicked on something.”His next question sounded like a groan. “Whhhhy?”“Because the girls were hard to see in their little boxes, and I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, what with the absence of anything I could recognize, understand, or read. So . . . could you?” I flashed my best smile and batted my longest eyelashes.He tapped and tapped and tapped; computer lights flickered and snapped, but in the end he took on the hijackers. My husband is a computer analyst of the engineering variety, called on by nations, kindreds, tongues, and peoples to wrangle their wiliest computer ills. He agreed to track down the bad guys and try to sort out my website trouble. He’s an expert, and the one and only member of my IT staff. It took him three weeks, seventy-five phone calls, one hundred and eleven billable hours, and a bottle of extra strength Excedrin. In the end, Hong Kong hijackers? One website.Us? Two new websites: lindalzern.net  &  16Toadstonelane.comWhat I’ve learned from the whole stolen website ordeal. Be Disney. Disney defends its intellectual properties and copyrights like a tigress protecting her cubs. Their legal team will go into a children’s daycare and make them paint over their Mickey Mouse mural. I get it. If you don’t, you turn your back and the next thing you know your clever little website name, which is partly your name, is a porn site in Hong Kong.Sigh. Important to note that I couldn’t have figured it out alone, not without going mad and running down Kissimmee Park Road tearing at my hair and wearing a ragged evening gown. Thanks, IT staff, our neighbors are grateful. But I do worry about the high cost of beating back the robbers and thieves and social media bots. The time, the energy, the grief that is involved with trying to track down and straighten out the tangled web woven by the unethical and the dishonest is exhausting. Double sigh.I guess I liked the world better when more people were worried about going to hell for breaking one of those handy ten commandments. Thou salt not make life miserable for everyone else. Just saying.Linda (Catch Them if You Can) Zern

HAPPY NEW WEBSITES FOR A HAPPY NEW YEAR AND EXCITING NEW BOOKS

FIND FANTASTICAL FUN @ 16Toadstonelane.com
AND NEAR-FUTURE APOCALYPTIC FIRE @ lindalzern.com

A Semi-Annual, Once in a While, End of the Year Inventory and Personal Disclaimer

A Semi-Annual, Once in a While, End of the Year Inventory and Personal DisclaimerI was born feet first, making me one of the last breach babies delivered the old-fashioned way, feet first. My mother was happy to tell me that in some primitive cultures I would have been left on a slab of granite and fed to the dingoes. It gave me an unnatural fear of kitchen counters and other flat surfaces. My mother smoked while she was pregnant with me on the advice of her doctor. And that fact gave me a healthy skepticism of fads, popular opinion, and common knowledge. Weren’t lobotomies all the scientific rage at one time? Some of the things important for you to know about me are:1.     I seriously don’t care if you want to dress up like a blue pony and whinny at the neighbors. Seriously. 2.     I’m short. I have endured songs in popular culture deriding my shortness, people patting me on the head like a cocker spaniel, and sleeves that are always three inches too long.3.     I’m an author. I have published books. I was a writer, which is a person that writes a lot of stuff: grocery lists, journal entries, emails, etc, but now I am an author. And that’s different.4.     You should know that I am a conservative. I have sixteen grandchildren. I cannot afford to have one or any of them living in my garage, smoking dope for a living.5.     My dog is old. She and I have the same hair color. Watching her become decrepit is like watching myself die. 6.     I’ve been married to the same man for forty-one years. We’ve listened to each other tell the same jokes and stories for forty-one years, and yet we still listen. That my friends is love.7.     I am religious. I find it’s always good to know which of the ten commandments people object to most, because then I’ll know whether to hide my husband or my purse.8.     Words come easily. Numbers come almost not at all, or as I like to say that I have a hole in my head where the numbers should be.9.     Horses are my favorite animal because you can’t ride on dogs.10.  I’ve been going to college for twenty years and with any luck I will never graduate. 11.  I want them to write on my tombstone: She taught her children to read.12.  When the grandchildren come to stay they say that we live on a farm and that our house is full of “back-then” stuff. 13.  One of my favorite children’s book is “Mistress Masham’s Repose” by T. H. White. From the blurb:  “Think to yourself, truly: would you return a live one-inch baby to its relatives, if caught fairly in the open field?” 14.  The best movie of all time is Strictly Ballroom because “A life lived in fear is a life half lived.”15.  I write fiction which is non-fiction without the non, so be warned that not everything you read is true or non, but it doesn’t have to be if it’s fiction.16.  And so I disclaim, once again.
Linda (Scribble On) Zern

THE SONG OF ZERN - 2019

1.     Now it came to pass in the days when many toddlers ruleth, there was no dearth in the land, for it had brought forth blessings in abundance. And a certain man of Saint Cloud-le-hem, even one Sherwood, once of Oviedo and all his tribe, did continue to camp in the land round about that city, near the Lake of much bass and air boats. 2.     And this people did build a patio of much bricks made of mud and straw, and seeing the building thereof, they did rejoice and invite-eth many to make merry upon the patio of mud and straw. And they did make merry, they and all those that did come to rejoice. 3.     And the name of the man’s wife was Linda and she did write much of her people’s doings both with mirth and much laughter, also making stories of her own imaginings, which being called fiction she did publish in abundance on a place, it being called Amazon.4.     And their tribe did increase. Wherefore some did journey forth out of the land of much bass and air boats, both to Texas and to Ohio to bring forth their own righteous purposes.5.     The Lorances did tarry in Texas, their father even T. J. once of Titusville, going forth to the oil rig to work. And he did telleth the youngest of them, even Boone, that should he not be good whilst his father worketh; he, that is to say Boone, would go forth to the rig to becometh a rig baby.6.     Boone then sayeth, “Nay. Nay. I want not to be a rig baby.” And Boone’s sisters did laugh much at the jest.7.     To the north, the Zerns of Ohio, did delight in the goodness of the land as Aric and Silas brought forth both pumpkins and tomatoes and cabbage and cucumbers until his goodly wife, Lauren, didest say, no more, for our cupboards be full. And Silas did ask his mother to go forth to see “the guns, the goats, and the boys” in Saint Cloud-le-hem. And she did sorrow to explain that this would be a trip requiring many days and much planning.8.     So the Stahles brought forth their youngest son and calleth him Ender after the character in a book of like name. 9.     And the other sons did play much upon a hill of sand at the abode of the Poppy and the YaYa, bringing forth from the ground much and varied creations made of trash; forts and bases and castles and kingdoms. Then Kip did make report that he and the others, being the many children found upon the hill of sand, did “dig and dig and dig, until they could not dig anymore.” 10.  At present, the sand hill fort boasteth both a cannon and a moat. And the children doth count the minutes and the days that Poppy should come forth and play “Monster,” it being a game of hide and seek in the dark of night that oft doth leave the Poppy breathless and with leg crampage.11.  The Zerns, Adam and Sarah and their four daughters, which did abide in the land round about Saint Cloud-le-hem adopted for their tent a dog, his name being Rowdy. He being a retired racing dog from the land of the east, being both tall and skinny.12.  And the tribe did continueth in this way, worshipping their God both in word and deed as they brought forth many to their Sunday dinner table to both eat of the good of the land and to talk over the many strange and curious happenings of these the last days.13.  And all these were the doings of our tribe in the land southward as we did scratch our heads and wonder aloud what God must think of the silliness that the world embraceth when left to itself. And with eagerness we did look forward to the drama and challenge and excitement of the year which is to come, even 2020. And I make an end. Amen.

NEAR-FUTURE . . .

I write near-future, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, grid collapse, survival, prepper fiction and some other stuff. It’s not an “elevator pitch” but it’s accurate. In the brave new world of publishing, getting your work “out there” in front of the public, above the morass of titles being published (i.e. marketing) can be a bigger job than writing the stinking book. It’s true. And part of that challenge is the elevator speech/pitch.Presumably, while riding in an elevator with the Queen of All Things Publishable, an author needs to have a pithy, engaging description of her book that lasts the duration of the elevator ride.I have questions. How tall is the building? How big is the elevator? Should the elevator pitch include an introduction? Is it stinky in the elevator?For example, should I find myself in the presence of a mover and shaker on an elevator: “Excuse me, Queen of All Things Publishable, my name is Linda L. Zern—yes, formal, I know—but it makes me feel taller to have the extra L. in there.” I take a breath. “My goodness, what is that smell?” Doors slide open and the Queen pushes me out of the way to escape the smell of big city fun wafting up from the corner of the elevator.Anyway, my elevator pitch is a work in progress. Here’s the raw material I’m working with if I ever corner the Queen of All Things Publishable in a smelly elevator.Near-Future: Not in the far away space-alien future. Tomorrow, or one possible tomorrow, should the trucks quit rolling, the grocery store shelves empty, and people start having to poop in the streets. Oops, I mean everywhere, not just San Fran.Dystopian: A genre dedicated to the collapse of civilization and the ensuing chaos—sort of like Junior High School.Post-Apocalyptic: POST means after, or a hunk of wood stuck in the ground that you staple barbed wire to, and APOCALYPTIC means what happens when stampeding beasts run through your barbed wire and hunks of wood. Or it can mean the fire, earthquake, war, storm, EMP, solar flare, giant meteor strike, outbreak, Black Friday shoppers . . . etc.Grid Collapse: The labyrinth of wires boiling with electricity fall down, and all of Granny’s ice cream sandwiches melt.Survival: Eating goober pie and will we? You will if you want to see the near-future.Prepper: The idea that with some planning and foresight your family won’t have to resort to cannibalism or progressive politics.Fiction: Stuff that’s made-up with some basic tips and tricks that might be non-fiction. Check on that.So, my speech:  “Queenie, if the lights go out and this elevator jams up between floors, I write about what happens next. Think “Hunger Games” without the ugly makeup. Here’s my card.Sincerely,Linda (Smell Ya’ Later) Zern

I is for Indignation

I is for Indignation (Warning: PG-13, Dirty Word Talk)

Nothing says loser like the phrase “chickensh$%".  It’s a time honored expletive that conveys the speaker’s total lack of respect for the object or receiver of the expression. (It’s on the Internet, so it must be true.) adjectiveadjective: chicken-sh@&;1.     worthless or contemptible (used as a general term of deprecation)."no more chickensh&* excuses"
nounnoun: chicken-sh&@;1.     a worthless or contemptible person.
Why is it such a powerful cuss word?Because chickensh$% is the silliest poop in the world, also chickens are cowardly. Well, some chickens are cowardly, and some chickens will rake your eyes out with their razor-like chicken spurs. And then they’ll take a icky dump on your lifeless husk as they eat you. It’s true.But I digress.  Chickens poop nasty. It’s pee-pee and poo-poo all wrapped up in one, which chickens leave like tiny landmines everywhere they roam, unless they’re roosting in the rafters of the barn and then they rain chickensh*% down on your head like tiny, stinky carpet bombs.Mostly, we keep our chickens in a chicken coop, except when we don’t. When the coop is getting a makeover or the chickens have escaped it’s possible that our chickens are “free ranging.” At present, we are re-modeling our coop. They are freely ranging.Free ranging means that chickens are allowed to roam freely—mostly to the rafters of our barn, over our heads, when we’re trying to have ballet class. It’s true. (Once a week, we have ballet class in the barn, leading to a lot of free ranging ballerinas wandering around. I just realized that ballerinas in the barn are weirder than chickens in the rafters.) So, there you go—free ranging chickens and free ranging ballerinas, and you’ve got the recipe for some crazy chickensh&# drama.Sure enough, my daughter-in-law, while practicing her step-ball-change (or twerking or grand jete or whatever) got be-fouled (see what I did there?) by our rooster. In an explosion of pee/poop she was blasted from above. The goosh hit her sleeve, dripped down her arm, only to plop onto the back of her ankle. She howled. The rooster calmly shifted his position in the rafters and went back to sleep. A lot of the twerk went out of our dance class at that point, I can tell you. Sigh.She was indignant, taking the rooster’s free ranging expression of biologic necessity personally. Looking on the bright side, I said, “At least it wasn’t in your hair.”The moral of the story: It’s a foul expletive. As a real life experience: It’s a foul expletive.Linda (Heads Up) Zern NOTE:  I can’t remember my father NOT using the phrase in relation to: the world, his job, politics, modern life, daily life, family life, groups of people . . . etc. I mean he loved saying it.

    

HAMSTER INFESTATION

So many time saving, work reducing, stress minimizing gadgets—so little time to figure out how they work or how to fix them when they don’t work or how to rid them of hamster infestations.

Troublesome, especially when you’ve become completely dependent and addicted to the use of afore mentioned gizmos.
Washers and dryers are real stress relievers—or they can be. When we were young, poor, newly married, and our clothes were often embarrassingly rumpled, someone gave us a FREE washing machine.

The FREE washing machine had a rat living in it. The rat left piles of rodent flotsam in and around the machine to make sure we understood who owned what.
We owned our rumpled clothes. The rat owned our washing machine. I found the situation stressful—not to mention frightening. What happened, or could happen, or might happen when adding that last pair of random biker shorts to the load? You might discover a rat doing the sidestroke during the wash cycle.

Those suckers can jump—the rat, not the biker shorts.
My newly wedded husband had to trap the washing machine rat and then bonk it on the head with a barbell. Afterwards, I thought I heard him shout, Today, I am a man.
Some years later, Brownie the “Knocked-Up” Hamster managed to escape her cage into our brand new squeaky-clean (never used) house. She re-located to the back of my brand new squeaky-clean (never used) stove. Driven by instinct and early labor, Brownie began to nest in the insulation of the stove. Occasionally, Brownie would stick her nose through the grating on the back of the stove, wiggle her whiskers at me, and giggle.
My phone call to the service center is legendary.“You don’t understand. There’s a hamster nesting in the back of my new stove.”
“Serial number please.”
“No, no serial number. This is an emergency. Brownie the Hamster is pregnant. She may be crowning.” My voice became more strident with each word.
Brownie pressed one eye to the grating and watched my panicked pacing. A whisper of pink insulation drifted from the back of the stove to the kitchen floor. 
“I can’t find any record of an extended warranty for you Mrs. Zern.”
“What difference does that make? Does your fancy warranty cover hamster labor and delivery?”
“We can have a repairman out there Friday of next week.”
“NEXT WEEK!  By that time, I’ll have a flock of hamsters setting up a condominium association in my beautiful new glass top stove. Argggggh!”
I thought I heard Brownie the Hamster asking for an epidural. 
“Listen, let me ask you something, Wanda,” I said, trying another tack. “That’s right, isn’t it? Wanda? So Wanda, what might happen, I mean what might the possible ramifications be, if I turn the oven on full blast and set it to self-clean?”
It took hours to pry Brownie out of that time saving invention.
Finally, when a car repairman, while checking the engine of our family van called out, “Hey lady, did you know you have a rat living in your engine?” I knew enough to play it cool.
“Of course I know there’s a rat in my engine. She’s our hamster’s second cousin, twice removed. Visiting from Bithlo.”
There are days when I’d rather wash my clothes by beating them with rocks down by the river, cook my buffalo on a stick over a fire pit, and drag my kids around between two tree trunks lashed to a goat. There’d be less stress, less work, and a lot less time wasted—also less rodent drama.
Linda (Driving Miss Rat) Zern 



     

Bug Zapper Blues

When we were young and newly hatched—also young and in love—my husband and I lived with our four young children on the Space Coast of Florida. The massive propulsion of rocket and shuttle launches from Cape Kennedy often rocked the windows and doors of our little love cottage. We were always properly respectful and impressed by the reach of mankind’s achievements.
It was a point of pride to stop whatever we were doing (dishes, dinner, dancing, sleeping, fist fighting, etc.) to watch the eastern horizon—hands on hearts, tears in eyes—as the United States of America raced into the frontier of space.
One deep, dark morning (about 2:00 am) I shook my husband awake to watch yet another triumph of human advancement.
“Get up,” I mumbled to Sherwood, “the shuttle’s going up. We gotta’ watch.”
Sherwood moaned, “The garbage is out all ready. Let me die.” He did not open his eyes.
“Come on. We should watch. Night launches are amazing.”
He dragged himself upright and clung to the window ledge behind our bed. We knelt, with our chins braced on the ledge, our bleary eyes fixed on a blazing light in the eastern sky. We watched. The light did not appear to move. We stared some more. The light remain fixed. We struggled to focus. The light blazed away.
We waited for the light to fade into the blackness of space. It did not. We watched and watched and watched. The light stubbornly refused to move.
At last, collapsing back into my pillow I said, “Honey, go back to sleep.”
Sounding confused, miffed, and a little whiney Sherwood asked, “Why?”
“Because for the last eight to ten minutes we’ve been staring at our next door neighbor’s bug zapper.”
He went back to sleep. And I lived to worship at the altar of space exploration another day.
This story pretty much sums up who we are, and how we got this way—excessive staring at bug zappers. And this is my blog, a space-age way of recording one’s thoughts, ideas, embarrassments, and foibles for the entire known world. Once upon a time, I would have made this record on papyrus, rolled it up, stuffed it into a ceramic jar, and asked to have the whole thing buried with me in my sarcophagus. I still might.
Disclaimer: Some of the stuff you will read here is true. Some of it is not. Some of it is the result of wishful thinking. Some of it is the result of too much thinking, and some of it is the result of too little thinking. But all of it will be written with joy and laughter, because the alternative is despair and weeping, and isn’t there more than enough of that stuff out there?
Thank you for your support,
Linda (Zippity the Zapped) Zern