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.com

What 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 shalt not make life miserable for everyone else. Just saying.

Linda (Catch Them if You Can) Zern