first HOA meeting & my new walkway

Well, I am now the secretary of the HOA (home owners association) for Country Club Courts. I think I also let myself get volunteered to help on the Finance Committee as I was leaving. After the "lively" discussion about this year's budget and the possible need to raise the HOA quarterly dues, I should probably have ducked quicker! :-) In fact, after much discussion about whether the grass in the courtyard should be mowed by push mower and whether or not to trim the wisteria, the Finance Committee took an action to go back and get additional bids on the trimming work and relook at the budget proposal and recommendation for raising the dues (or the amount by which they wanted to raise them). You do need to realize that the wisteria to be trimmed is along both sides of a 1400' x 7' concrete wall on the exterior of the subdivision. That's a LOT of wisteria!! And, apparently, it has not been trimmed in 4-5 years. (It is also in most of our yards, along the section of wooden fence that is on one side of each home. We are, of course, responsible for taking care of that.) The guy who still wanted the oversized riding mowers to eat up the grass in the 15' square courtyards got ignored! And we voted down the idea of putting in locking mailboxes throughout the complex because some people had mail stolen once. (Though they were given permission to put a locking insert in their current mailbox. All the mailboxes have to remain the same. We don't want to marr the aesthetics with dissimilar mailboxes! It was also suggested that they could get a P.O. Box, if they were really concerned.)

So, now you know what elderly, retired people care about. :-) And the half-dozen "youngsters" like myself who live here get to care about it with them.

None the less, I enjoyed my first HOA meeting. They have a covered dish dinner before it and about half of those who attended came for that. There were 35 voting members, including 9 proxies (so 9 less actually present). But there were probably about 35-40 there, since couples only get one vote but most do come together. Since there are only 42 homes, that's a pretty good turnout. At least we were well past quorum. It was a good way to begin to get to know some of my neighbors.

The other news is that they did pour my walkway on Monday. They got it poured and it was set up before the rain started that lasted most of the rest of the week. However, the owner had a cold even worse than mine the day he came to bid it for me. So, he "trusted" his workers to do my curved walkway while they were doing the other two straight ones and a driveway in the area. That was not a good idea. It's curved all right! But the idea was that it formed an S type curve of consistently 42" width. Well, it measures from 32" in places to nearly 40" in others. :-( They will be breaking that one up & hauling it off and he will be making sure it gets dug and the forms set correctly! In the end, that, too, may be a blessing. They also managed to puncture a line on my sprinkler system, which was turned on Saturday. Oops! So ... they are to come break up what they poured & put the new forms down and allow me time to get the sprinkler guy back to run the new line underneath before they pour the concrete.

Life is never dull!