"Soliloquy" wrote in message
4...


I work with a guy that is the president of a Home Owners Association.
Talk about an asshole. A woman in his area approached him to get
permission to have a yard sale. Of course he vacillated, and she grew
angry. He reassured her that her request would be considered by the
council.

Of course, her request was denied. All those cars parking in front of
other people's property would not be fair to the other people.

Fair, fair, fair. boy have I tired of this word.

This guy seems severely traumatized by the fact that these
neighborhood
associations no longer have the ability to regulate satellite antennas
39.37" or smaller in diameter.

We have trouble with our interloping neighbor even though we don't
live
in an area covered by these prohibitions. The neighbor is the vice
president of the city council in the small borough that we live in
near
Pittsburgh. We first moved here, she expressed a desire for us to cut
down (for safety reasons of course LOL), every freakin tree on our
property. She made sure to tell us that the leaves on our property
were
"our responsibility" to rake up. (hell, I didn't put them there, the
trees should have to rake them up). We had the diseased trees removed
at
a considerable cost, and had the others trimmed.

Trees! Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em! Mr. T moved into
one of our most exclusive suburbs back in the 80s. Like many new
homeowners, he wanted to do some landscaping. In Mr. T's case,
landscaping meant shaving everything outside his mansion down to a
stubble. Mr. T announced his landscaping decision with a wailing
chainsaw. The startled neighbors reacted as strongly as if T had been
firing a poorly aimed automatic weapon. Amusing court battles between
the Newly Wealthy Thespian and the Inheritors of the Robber Barons
ensued. Oh, if only the oil refiners, the meat packers and the
industrialists who built the North Shore suburbs had the foresight to
see that an environmental vandal might show up right there in their
midst!! And all of this happened without CC&Rs. Just as well. I'd
pity the fool who'd try to write up Mr. T to a Homeowner's Association.



You think that she would have had a geriatric orgasm. Noooo, she found
more things to harp about. My son had bought a 1967 Chevy that we
parked
at the top of our driveway, even though the car was not licensed, as
it
needed work before it was roadworthy. We were away for the weekend
when
the local police drove onto our property and tagged our car as
abandoned,
we had a week to get the car licensed. Enter Classic car plates. We
had
to get regular plates for our car, then subsequently applied and were
issued classic car plates. The car was legal, they couldn't tow it,
and
there it sat as before her interloping started.

But she never quits. We wanted to erect a privacy fence, but in this
relatively dilapidated neighborhood, believe it or not, there is an
ordinance against them. We had to resort to a shadow box fence. Prior
to
this, we had the property surveyed, and the front of our property
includes a small part of what the neighbors assumed were theirs.
Apparently the loss of a small part of their property was too much to
bear, as the survey spike was removed and moved closer to our
property.

Imagine this woman in charge of a homeowners association? I'd rather
live in the country in West Virginia (I like West Virginia, very
pretty
country) with a refrigerator on the front porch and a small junk yard
in
my front yard than to live in a neighborhood covered by a covenant.
Years ago in a telecommunications magazine, I read an article in which
an
amateur had crafted an antenna, essentially a pole with a narrow
skirt,
and placed it in the yard. He told the neighbors that it was a
birdfeeder, and that the design was to preclude squirrels from
climbing
it. The only problem was that other neighbors began to ask if he could
help them construct similar birdfeeders. Well, at least theirs won't
require a buried wire running to them.

I have no doubt that most Homeowner's Associations are run by decent and
reasonable folk. I'm sure that's true of most small public governments,
as well. But what happens when things go bad? Given the sorry state of
human nature, it will, sooner or later. There's small time control
freaks in private and public life. But we have a better chance with
them if we don't sign away our rights.

Frank Dresser


http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/reg...trictions.html