The HOA War begins

The foxes and The HOA are competing for being the neighborhood evil. Actually, the really bad thing is, given the chance, I would love to have a pet fox. Just a little irony there. Hubby loves it. Hubby’s having his own little problem with The HOA. He used to have a war with the mailman at the old house. I have no idea how it started, but it was ongoing for nearly fifteen years.

Hubby has an internet business, so he works at home. He’s almost always home during the day and our weather here is almost always sunny. Mail to the house shouldn’t be a problem, but we couldn’t have packages sent to the house because the mailman would actually hold packages for a rainy day and then leave them on our doorstep in the rain. He wouldn’t ring the bell, he’d just leave it in the rain. Hubby was home, there was no point to this. He was just being petty.

There’s no house there now, so the war is over. However, Hubby has an HOA to play with now. Yay? Our neighbors were over a few months ago. (I’ll call them Mr. & Mrs. Patience and you really have no idea how well it suits them. They have three girls and a boy between the ages of twelve and seventeen? Cringe.) Their oldest daughter had a party the week before and they wanted to know if we were bothered by it. Bothered? Actually, we didn’t notice. 

There’s a rule about no parking on the street overnight, it’s in the HOA binder. Sure, well, define ‘overnight.’ Apparently it’s past midnight. Mr. Patience received a notice from The HOA citing the regulation and a picture of the cars in front of his house with a time/date stamp on it.

So . . . someone from The HOA drives around at midnight looking for infractions and taking pictures? Really? Can I have that job and how much does it pay? Benefits?

Two things happened at that moment. I got a sudden urge to reread 1984, and Hubby developed a twitching need to bait them. Kill me. Then a couple months ago Hubby got very excited about a package he received, going on and on in Y-chromosome-ese about some online trade. With a grin, he opened it proudly and showed me a 1970s coin-fed parking meter that he wants to sink in concrete in our grass parking strip. 

I’m sorry, did you not read that correctly? My husband of twenty years wants to install a coin fed parking meter in front of our house to tick off The HOA. Naturally, I questioned him. Something along the lines of “Wha-?” Usually I’m more coherent, but words failed me. He explained he examined the HOA regulations, both binders, and can’t find anything specifically against it. The city says we just have to be sure to have a notice on it that it’s non-functional, for decorative use only, or some other indicator that it’s not official in any way. That’s all? Great!

What about taste?

Hubby’s still trying to argue the parking meter is art. The Boy suggested painting it purple, and I almost went for that for the sheer lunacy of it. For now, it sits in the front hall (not a win) and waits until its fate is determined. I’ve budged a little, I’ll allow it in the backyard. I think that’s reasonable.

Seven cats later...

So The HOA was this vague evil that hung in the distance. We didn’t have a dog, and that we didn’t hear the neighbors’ dogs barking or see them running loose wasn’t exactly a hardship.

Then our cat disappeared. That was a surprise. She was fine for two weeks, caught mice already, and wasn’t at the animal shelter. Hmm. Assuming the worse, we immediately drove the streets looking for evidence of a hit-and-run. Yes, we’re morbid.

Nothing. The kids were heartbroken. Fine, we got another cat. This one lasted a week. Hubby was miffed. The neighbor across the street cited HOA rules against cats leaving your yard. Was he serious? Apparently, it was in there. Yeah? Enforce it. The next two cats also disappeared, as did three more from the cul-de-sac. 

Seven missing cats caught everyone's attention. People began to talk, whispers behind turned backs so no one could overhear. It was very dramatic. Several of the kids/teens thought the ‘mean’ man across the street was a secret agent for The HOA and was shooting the cats. I’ll dismiss that one, although one neighbor did get a warning letter from The HOA regarding his wandering pet. True. 

The development backs against a golf course where foxes live and my son and hubby can attest they grow to the size of small deer. This is my personal theory. Cat collars have bells on them so it’s like advertising “Dinner time!” every time we let them outside. Of course we also have owls. I know from personal experience an owl can and will carry off a cat or small dog. And I’ve seen a bald eagle fishing in one of our ponds. It makes the seagulls and ducks nervous.

We have another cat because my hubby is an idiot. I mean because he loves the kids. She insists on going outside now that the weather’s good. Stupid cat. I insist she be back inside before dark when most of the predators come out. She’s a year old now and she grew up being told she’s going to be eaten by a fox. She’s a little neurotic. Hopefully something sunk in and she’ll last a little longer than our last four. Anyone taking bets?

Stepford HOA

Hubby and I celebrated our twentieth anniversary on December 21^st (and the world didn’t end, so much for the Mayan calendar). We built a house after being married a couple years, and a year an a half ago the Department of Transportation tore it down. We just celebrated the one year anniversary of that event. We celebrate bizarre things in this family. ‘Observe’ might be a better verb. Anyway, we have pictures of the house being built, and pictures of it being torn apart. The kids had a blast watching it come down.

Being forced to sell your house to the state at a loss and move turned out okay in the end. No, not bitter. We ended up in another new house that the builder had been sitting on for over a year after the sale fell through. The house is gorgeous and they kept dropping the price. Granted the market was soft and everyone is worried for their jobs (me too) and broke (us too) but we couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t sell this house.

The answer? Everyone else understood one line in the contract: HOA.

I read 1984 in junior high, but it’s fiction, right? (Laughs hysterically.) No.

We have two HOA contracts in our housing development. I thought that was odd. One for the development as a whole, we have a binder for that. A whole binder. We had to sign a contract on it when we signed the closing paperwork on the house. There’s a separate contract and smaller binder that covers our specific cul-de-sac and a few others that border the water features in the development. So two separate sets of rules.

Hubby and I thought it was funny. We laughed, signed, glanced at it, and moved.

We met the neighbors. They talked about The HOA in hushed tones. We laughed.

We started to notice odd things. You don’t see or hear cats or dogs. They’re around, but dogs don’t bark. How do you stop a dog from barking? Apparently our HOA can do that.

           
Hello, Tori. Welcome to Stepford.

Welcome

 Welcome. Please, stay awhile, browse.

I’m a wife and mother of two teens and a cat. It’s kind of a toss up which is the most interesting of the mentioned relationships. Oh, also a lizard. I don’t count the lizard because he just hangs out in his little terrarium and stares down the cat. Cat-TV.

Anyway, so, teens. Yeah. If you don’t have one of your own, or have never had one, don’t. Kidding. Up until my youngest, we’ll call him ‘The Boy’, hit third grade, I wondered what exactly was wrong with me. I mean, the kids were perfect. My oldest, we’ll call her ‘The Girl’, was almost a perfect baby. She slept through the night at a month. Everyone adored her. Smart, pretty, polite, considerate, thoughtful, talented – I know, something’s wrong here, right? The Boy was a little more demanding as a baby, but still just about as good as you could get in a little boy. It was like Walt Disney was watching over us or something.

Then the tween years started and someone tipped off The Boy (the school’s sex-ed program, I think) what was expected in the teen years. Being the introspective child that he was, he realized that Hubby and I, as parents, would be missing some vital experiences in our lives by having such perfect children. His sensitive little soul just couldn’t let that happen to us. The Girl clearly had already shrugged off the problem, but he would rise to the challenge for our sakes!

So The Boy has single-handedly undertaken the task of being the tween and now the teen migraine for both himself and his sister. It’s been a load on him, and his grades have slipped with the strain. I’ve tried to tell him it’s okay. I’ve got a taste of the teen experience and I’m good now. I can scrapbook it and move on. He can stop. I don’t think he believes me.

Sometimes I just want to march into The Girl’s tidy little room and ground her for making The Boy do her job for her. But I’d have to walk by The Boy’s room to do it, and there’s this odor…