Photos by Amanda Naylor, PThreePhoto.com

Thursday, April 19, 2012

This Lemming, Right Here.

I live a charmed life.  

Unfortunately, my forte in writing seems to be sarcastic diatribes about the mundane, a la Jerry Seinfeld.  Truth be told, I am a little bit afraid to write in my favored genre; it seems irreverent to complain—however comically—about my life when I am so blessed.

Being so unbelievably fortunate makes it much more difficult to come up with good material for my notoriously bitter, bad-natured, self-obsessed rants.  Nevertheless, I will preserve.  I will push on and find something to complain about:

And 2.5 seconds later…  

 My neighborhood.  God help us (and our grey-haired, respectable neighbors), we are a young family living in what was originally intended to be a retirement community for senior citizens.  Quiet.  Civilized.  By its definition, free of free-ranging, shrieking children and lawless, leashless, yapping dogs and noisy friends and rusted cars and parties with DJs and loud trucks and dirt bikes and chainsaws and sidewalk chalk and battery-operated pink toddler-sized Hummers.  And free of Greg—yelling and singing and loud-talking Greg, especially.

Yep, there goes the neighborhood.

I read the HOA documents before we signed the contract to move into this community.  Honestly, I thought they were a joke.  Owners can’t park on the street or plant a plant?  Clearly those forty-something pages of rules akin to these are meant to be pulled out in extreme cases…like, say, for that hard-partying, boom box with bass turned all the way up-blaring neighbor who builds a fence out of tie-dyed car tires and uses an old toilet as a flower planter for marijuana and parks fifteen junked cars inhabited by drunken hobos in his yard which is also home to a flock of lice-infested, 4AM-crowing chickens, fifty-two feral cats, a blind, three-legged mutt chained to a half-eaten, hot pink dog igloo, and a rabid, stolen Bengal tiger who frequently gnaws its way lose and mauls visiting grandchildren.  

But they were deadly serious about all of them.  A week ago, I got an e-mail from the HOA detailing exactly what grade of black-dyed, hardwood mulch must be used to spruce up any planting areas, and just today I got a “spring reminder” e-mail today from the HOA stating that both a written proposal and a pictorial plan needed to be submitted to the property management group if a resident planned to plant anything in “their” gardens.
   
A month ago—after I accidentally slammed Brooke’s fingers in the door trying to let my dogs out and became distracted by assuring that none of those fingers had been crushed or severed—the dogs started running from the yard.  Just as soon as it was clear to me that Brooke was going to survive, I shut her into the house (yes, I shut her alone in the house—please don’t call child services—because I was frantic about keeping track of the dogs, and I couldn’t pick her up and run with her because I had a hernia—see? charmed life!) and tried to run after them while clutching aforementioned hernia.  As you can imagine, I wasn’t very fast, and so they reached the down-the-street neighbor’s yard before me.  I was hot on their heels, though, and as I reached the yard, calling their names in my most stern dog-mother voice, my gleeful dogs were barking, and the furious neighbor was rounding the corner, clutching to her chest her small, brown dog (who, in Ringo’s defense, did resemble a groundhog, and you know how Jack Russells feel about groundhogs) and screaming the word, “LEASH!” into my face. I was not given a chance to explain my situation or to apologize. “LEASH!”  (Translation: “There is a strict leash law in the neighborhood.  It is enforced, and a fine is forthcoming.”)

Accidents be damned.  

And fences, apparently~well, "dividing instrumentalities" they are considered by the HOA.  Never wanting to replay the horrors  depicted in that story just now, we promptly requested permission to construct a fence to corral our ferocious, lawless, monstrous, 20-pound attack dogs (and equally terrifying children).  Permission denied.  

And play areas:  “No temporary or permanent play areas are permitted.”   So, we can just forget about leaving that two-foot Little Tykes plastic sliding board outside overnight.

And, same goes for the one-foot diameter circular satellite dishes that the non-cable half of America uses.  We requested permission to put a one in “our” garden because DirecTV is way cheaper than cable.  Denied.  Satellite dishes are a blight on the “excellent outward appearance” of the neighborhood, as are burned out lightbulbs in exterior lights, grills, big trucks, boats, campers, ATVs, livestock, poultry, basketball hoops, skateboards, kiddie pools, actual pools, motorized vehicles parked outside of the garage, signs, flags, lawn ornaments, garbage containers, dividing instrumentalities, paint, laundry, tents, shacks, sheds, construction materials, screen doors that aren’t full-view style, and so on and so forth ad nauseum.

There are exactly two floorplans of houses in this community (all of the two-stories have the same hunter-colored shutters and door, and all of the ranchers have the same burgundy-colored shutters and door).  ALL of the houses are clad in the exact same stone facing and the exact same BEIGE siding.  All of the trim is painted the in the same shade of beige.  The same landscaper installed all of the gardens in the same general layout with plant media from a list of approved vegetation.  Homogenous.  I would invoke plain vanilla, but boring beige is much more appropriate in this situation.  Changing the outward appearance of the home in any way is disallowed without board approval.

And since no one has any power over their property, I guess they divert their attentions to imposing rules, watching for infractions, making formal complaints, and determining enforcement actions to ensure compliance.

What kind of lemming signs up to be part of something like this?  This lemming, right here.  And her husband lemming.

Greg is a man (to clarify: not actually a lemming...but is there a difference?).  He didn’t read the HOA documents before he signed the papers.  If he had, which he wouldn’t have and didn’t (restatement for added emphasis), he wouldn’t have intended to follow the rules anyway.  He is a renegade.  I didn’t think that I was rebellious or confrontational before I moved here, but now I’m downright oppositional-defiant.  I realize, rationally, that since I signed up to live in this neighborhood despite having read ALLLLL of its rules, I really have no right to complain about or rebel against them.  I'm choosing to ignore that rational line of thought for this one.  There’s just something really unsettling about being the least anal, OCD person in the group for the first time in nearly thirty years.  And it makes me want to SCREAM!  (But I can’t because “[n]o noxious, unsightly or offensive activity shall be conducted on any Lots or on the streets…[and] No annoying or nuisance activity which is offensive to other Owners will be tolerated.")

So, now I am quietly whispering to no one in particular: Darn it all to heck.

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