Smart Security Alert

If I get any safer or more secure my body probably won’t be found until the spring thaw. And it doesn’t snow in Florida. 

I have a smart phone. The problem with my smart phone is that it’s stupid, and it gets itself lost CONSTANTLY. 

When I was a girl our phone wasn’t smart. And it didn’t go for rides in our pants. It sat on the kitchen counter or hung on the kitchen wall and behaved itself. When I was a girl I knew where to find the phone and how smart is that?

Now the smart phone goes for rides to the store, the gas station, and the barn where it gets itself lost, forgotten, or misplaced. How stupid is that?

Married but alone more than not alone (my husband is either an international computer analyst or a spy) I’m often encouraged, by people who want me to do stuff for them on a regular basis, to carry my phone with me when I’m hanging from the barn rafters dusting for black widow spider webs. They worry I might break a hip and not be available to cook Sunday dinner for twenty-seven.

So, I do. I carry the phone with me around the farm, where I consistently forget, lose, or misplace it while dusting for black widow spider webs.

And that’s how it went. I remembered in the middle of the night that I needed my phone. How else am I going to call the cops when I’m attacked by giant black widow spiders in my bed? Right?

So, I threw on my pink bathrobe with the red hearts and tromped out to the barn to find my smart phone. Except the barn rabbit--the one that refuses to stay in a cage--saw me, ran straight at me, flipped sideways, and shot rabbit urine at my ankles. 

She’s a good shot—also excellent barn security.

I screamed, lunged for my phone, and took off back to the house where I realize that I’m locked out because of all of my husband’s nagging about heightened security—every window and door—locked, bolted, sealed. But I have my smart phone. Unfortunately, it’s not a key to any of the doors.

Nothing to be done but push open the bathroom window with the broken latch. 

Have you ever tried to push open our bathroom window with the broken latch?

Yeah, well . . . if you’re looking for a quick way to amputate an appendage then I’ve got a window for you.

Afraid it would break my neck if it fell on me, I wedged the window open with a rake. As I scrambled through the glass guillotine my smart phone fell out of the pocket of my bathrobe into the bug-infested bushes beneath the window.

“That is the dumbest phone ever,” I said to no one in particular as I tumbled into the bathtub.

An observation or two: Security is in the eye of the beholder and a phone is only as smart as its owner. Also, furry bunnies are urine- shooting terrorists.

Linda (Safety Zone) Zern 

MOONCALF - Published

by Linda L. Zern

(click on the above link to download or order a copy for your family at Amazon.com)

Children are born loving. They must be taught to hate. 

A juvenile fiction novella set in the rural countryside of 1966 Florida.

Tribute in Hot Wax

When I was a girl growing up in the liberated seventies after the radical sixties, we were told that true freedom consisted of two things: 1) letting it all hang out after burning your bra and 2) going natural after losing your safety razor. 

After all, men didn’t have to wear restrictive, tight whalebone corset stays . . . er . . . um . . . I mean they didn’t have to wear over the shoulder boulder holders, and men got to have hairy wildebeests legs, so women should get to have hairy wildebeest legs too. 

We called it liberation. Mostly it was just droopy and hairy.

Still . . . it was kind of interesting to think that women might be more than the sum of their . . . er . . . um . . . parts, even if they had to be hairy to do it. It was interesting. 

For a day or two.

Now it’s bizarre uses for hot wax.

Please be advised that the names have been changed to protect my daughters who are going on a cruise and feel the need to render their bodies as hairless as newborn rats.

“But why?”





“Because everyone is doing it,” one unnamed daughter argued.

“Always a great reason to do anything,” I countered.

She then demonstrated the proper position to assume when having hot wax poured over your . . . er . . . um . . . less than hairless bits, followed by her pantomiming a violent ripping motion. She then acted out the resulting screaming, throwing her legs over her head, crossing her eyes, and passing out.

My other nameless daughter sighed and said, “I didn’t use hot wax. I tried those wax strippy things.”

“Have you lost your . . .”

She cut me off, frowning.

“They didn’t work very well. I now look like a well loved teddy bear.”

“Good grief. You turned yourself into the velveteen rabbit before it winds up on the rubbish heap,” I said with a hand on my . . . er . . . 
um . . . heart.

“Pretty much.”

“What happened to the bra burning, boob drooping, hairy legged, proud momma, caftan wearing women of my youth?”

“They got a special deal on a Caribbean cruise.”

Right. That’ll do it.

Linda (All Natural) Zern