Romance Author
My name is Zuzi, and I am a little Shih-Tzu and Toy Poodle mix. I am five years old and weigh ten pounds. For the past several years I played in our doggie park and socialized with my neighborhood canine pals, but now without warning, I have been locked out of my doggie park.
The big, bad insurance company in its Orwellian demand has instructed our HOA that dogs are to be discriminated against in opposition to Section 541 of the Texas Insurance Code which states that it is illegal for insurers to engage in unfair acts. This is unfair because our CCRS state that dogs are allowed without the mention of breed or size or separating large dogs from smaller ones, but now Philadelphia Insurance Co., wants us to change the language in the CCRS to deny certain breeds and establish new conditions, but we are grandfathered in on page 12.
Further, municipalities and counties are prohibited from enacting breed specific legislation, and Texas Health and Safety Code Section 822.047 prevents local governments from creating laws that ban or restrict specific breeds. Behavior-based regulation is accepted in Texas which regulates "dangerous dogs" on a case-by-case basis defined by their behaviour rather than by breed. By extension, we are protected like our owners from discrimination.
If our present insurer hates dogs, then there are other companies like State Farm who do not discriminate, and who might welcome our business.
The doggie park is not a real dog park because it is only about 50 x 25 feet in size, and you can only fit six people in there, maybe just three if they are overweight. They like to arrive on their golf carts to sit in the dog pen and have an evening gossip about all the bad news while we dogs chase each other.
We all live out here at Lake Conroe for the fresh air and peace, and do not want to be controlled by insurance companies who don't understand our way of life. Since our CCRS did not specify that large dogs had to be separated from small dogs, and some of our neighbors do have large dogs and tiny ones, we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings by mandating that they are prohibited from bringing their two dogs into the play pen. That would be discrimination!
Dogs like me, were put on this earth to teach love, loyalty, companionship and forgiveness, and we are not interested in money, politics or religion. We just want everyone to get along and enjoy our community. But it seems the insurer wants to create disharmony where none existed for the simple reason of increasing our fees. Pay up or get locked out! That is blackmail!
What is the insurer going to do about the coyotes that roam around our open fields next to the dog park? And the deer - which everyone here loves - that I always bark at and chase - are they going to increase our insurance because they can't control the wildlife? Big city insurer executives have no understanding of our country way of life. I am just a little dog who wants to play and regulating me would break my spirit.
Alinka and John take me on walkies in the open fields around the lakes and remove my leash so I can run around to get much-needed exercise, but I do miss rubbing noses with my friends in the doggie park that the Fido hater insurers are denying me.
—Zuzi
The Lindsays of Balcarres, A Century of an Ancient Scottish Family in Photographs by Ludovic Lindsay, is a fabulous book with great photos about this enigmatic family I descend from.
Dundee-born romance author Alinka Zyrmont laughs that there’s a simple reason why she became a writer – because she’s terrible at maths! As a pupil at Dundee’s Blackness School in the 1940s/50s where her mum was a teacher, she used to daydream a lot…
(Read more about Alinka in The Courier: Scotland’s Year of Stories 2022: What makes a good story?)
Visit the Zuzi's Tail page
Read more about Zuzi in Tattle Tales
Read more about Water is a precious commodity and is the essence of life in Tattle Tales
Repeal the New Hate Crime and Public Order Act of Scotland
Read more about D-Day in Tattle Tales
Did Adolf Hitler stage his own death, as the Soviets were encircling Berlin in 1945, and escape to Argentina under the protection of President Juan Peron? Lucy Muir, a flight attendant nicknamed the Flying Sleuth, with a penchant for solving mysteries flies down to the Southern Hemisphere to find out, and becomes embroiled with an Olympic Norwegian skier, in a neo-Nazi's lair.
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Flight attendant, Lucine Muir, is enjoying her job and condo on the beach in Florida, when she breaks her leg, and a man is murdered in Coconut Grove. Unexpected romance comes calling when an orthopedist loses his identity. She helps resolve the mystery with her sleuthing skills, and sails through stormy waters with her typical panache.
New Release
Trade Paperback
A Miss Florida is shot in Palm Beach when she opens her door to receive a bouquet of roses for her birthday. The police suspect her billionaire husband, but when his yacht is found abandoned in a hurricane they presume he drowned and close their file considering it a murder-suicide. But was it?
From the glamour of Houston, to the steamy tropical jungles of Central America, it will take all of Lucine Muir's courage to stay alive while deceived by a covert operator masterminding American political affairs in El Salvador. Lucine thought she was only working as a Spanish translator for a coffee export business while she had a few days off as a flight attendant, never imagining she was immersed in the scandalous Iran Contra Affair. A Flying Sleuth Thriller
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I am ecstatic to inform my readers that after five long years of writing this book, it is finally available on in paperback. I tried to keep the price as low as I could so that history students could afford it.
When I found a bag full of old photographs that my mother had kept for years as her own secret, I displayed them on a table, and on the backs they had dates, places and names, and like a jigsaw puzzle a picture emerged, but there were many missing pieces of a story that was emerging about WW2...
4 star review
“Easily read and a good reference book. A very useful reference book.”
Millar, U.K.
