Miscellaneous Excuses Used Randomly

HOW TO CATCH A FREE RANGE BABY!

It's been a bit of time since I've gathered my thoughts, posted my opining, and laughed at everything. 

What?? I've been busy. 

I finished a one hundred thousand word novel, mowed a lot of grass, pressure washed the barn once or twice and began to grow out my gray hair. Like I said, I've been busy.

But here's a few random bits to tide us all over:

Spoke at my first writer's conference last weekend and met some enthusiastic readers, writers, and Indian Chiefs. Had some fun eavesdropping. NOTE: If you are a writer you know the importance of hanging upside down from the eaves to be able to overhear real people trying to talk to each other.

I met a fellow Indie writer who was excited to tell me that he publishes Kindle stories and that his UK fans are the BEST. Another excited writer overheard the discussion and with a lovely, lilting southern accent chimed in to declare, "Oh, you too. My husband is a crazy, wild fan of U. K." 

They tried talking around each other and to each other. I listened in fascination to the big, swirly mess of their attempts to communicate, because he was talking United Kingdom and she was saying University of Kentucky.

To my knowledge, they never arrived on the same page. Random Conclusion: If it's that hard for two wordsmiths to communicate, what chance does the world have to figure stuff out?

We gutted our kitchen . . . after the dishwasher motor burned out. Doesn't that sound frivolous and silly? I wish. The repair individual--not man, because who knows these days--put a new motor in our six-month-old dishwasher, neglecting to hook up the drain. I ran the dishwasher. It drained. It drained all the way to the baseboards. The floor started to float. We complained. The bosses paid for a new floor. We got uppity and thought, "Let's upgrade."

The tile was fancy and cool, but it jacked up the dishwasher one-quarter inch so that it no longer fit in the wonky cabinet built by the original owner/builder. Time to tear out that cabinet which made all the other cabinets come tumbling down like dominoes (metaphorically speaking). Time to refinance the house, and rip the guts out of the nerve center of our home. Start over. Flip your lid. Remodel everything. Sure. Sure. What could go wrong? 

Random Conclusion: Live in the woods.

Grandparenting is eighty percent fun and twenty percent worry. Parenting is twenty percent fun and eighty percent worry. As a grandparent I know that whatever weirdo thing those kids are going to do or are doing, someday they're going to outgrow that goofiness—or not. 

Miscellaneous sentiment: Good luck, young parents, and God's speed. You're going to need it. I'll hold your coat while you worry.

That's it for now. Like I said, "I'm busy trying to figure out if the tile guys are ever coming back since Home Depot finally found that last box of tile they shorted us."

What could go wrong?

Linda (Save the Date) Zern 

A QUICKIE: Posts That Are Short And Sweet

FARM ALERT: Just saw three boys racing by, followed by three running goats. Not sure if the boys think that they're goats or the goats think that they are boys.

It's Mrs. Tramp. First name Eleven.

Jittery

Reports of my imagined death are false—also incorrect. I’m not dead.

To recap: I am not dead. I’m just concentrating really hard.

Several years ago, my husband couldn’t instantly get a hold of me via my cell phone, because it was dead, the cell phone. NOT ME. When he couldn’t immediately contact me from Kuala Lumpur or Detroit or Walmart or wherever to let me know he’d forgotten to take out the garbage or something equally informative, he panicked.

So he called our daughter, Heather.

Who called our daughter, Maren.

Who told her friends at school that I’m a hermit and a nut.

Who called my husband, her father.

Who called our daughter, Heather, again.

Who called each other, over and over, whipping each other into a frenzy.

Heather finally broke the cycle of hysteria by calling her friend, Maria, and saying, “I’m at work. Could you drive out to my parent’s house and check on my AGED mother?”

Maria! Marie who lives in a whole other village, Marie, who got in her car, drove to our country home (also our city home) and finding all the doors, window, and portholes open assumed that I had been eaten by cats—also raccoons.

I was in my office—working.

Proving that what we’ve got here is a hefty case of the jitters.

While it is true that I live alone a great deal of time, I am not a complete idiot. I try to wait for when my husband is home to clean the chimney, re-organize the hayloft, chop down trees, or check the crawlspace for expired squirrels.

And as far as being murdered in my sleep by criminal types, I believe that most criminal types are stupid people, the kind of people that get stuck in chimneys. And if I can’t outsmart some nimrod stuck in my chimney then shame on me.

That’s why I sleep with the cat. Plan A is that I will throw the cat at the stupid intruder and make my escape out of the bathroom window. At which point I will run to the ditch out front and hide behind the enormous stump that the county hasn’t carted away from storm damage. It’s the main reason I haven’t called the county about the eyesore stump by the road. That stump is part of my master plan. I have a detailed schematic drawn up.

Please note: That stump has been hauled off since I first reported on the above foolishness, thus changing plan A to plan B.

Unfortunately, plan B has me hiding in my neighbor’s barn in my *scanties. So sometimes I sleep in my bathrobe with my cell phone in the pocket, except that my cell phone is quite often “dead,” thus kicking off jittery meltdowns in the first place. Go figure.

Linda (Chimney Sweep) Zern

*Scanties is a southern word for clothing you don’t want to be caught wearing while hiding in a ditch.