Heart of the City by Steenz for June 14, 2012

I remember seeing an article just the other day of a woman who was fined by her Homeowner’s association because her daughter drew on a sidewalk with chalk. Seriously? It makes me glad to live in a rural area!

In my experience homeowner’s associations end up being run by miserable people with no lives and nothing better to do with their time than make everyone else miserable.

Compare the size of Heart’s and Dean’s noses to that of Darryl (the dad on Baby Blues).

I agree. An hoa told a little girl’s parents she couldn’t keep hens in their backyard. They had to go. The little girl was allergic to animal fur so the hens were the best pets besides laying eggs. Apparently, they had them before the hoa made any restrictions and when a neighbor found out, made a complaint. The hens are now at a sanctuary when they can visit anytime but the little girl is heartbroken. Those hens were so friendly and she misses them terribly. Even the mother was crying when they drove away from the sanctuary.Before I consider buying a house, I’ll ask if it’s in a gated community with an hoa. If it does, bye bye. We live in America. We have enough rules, laws, and regulations running our lives from state and federal governments, without having some hoa telling me how to live in my own house.

@Everyone – I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that none of you have ever run for, let alone served on, an HOA board.I have. I didn’t like the way my HOA was being run, so I and some like-minded friends ran for the HOA board and were elected. The woman who was president was upset by the number of cars speeding through the neighborhood (we had some moderaly steep slopes and some teenagers and adults liked to see how fast they could go down them), so she worked with the city to get some speed bumps / speed humps installed. Her thanks? Her house was vandalized. We had an older couple come to us complaining that a fence in the neighborhood was “ugly”. We pointed out to them that A) the fence met city code as far as height and setback from the street, B) “ugly” was in the eye of the beholder and not something easily defined, and C) the house in question was outside our HOA. They went away angry that we didn’t do anything. We had a few people complain about how we were running things. We encouraged them to run for the HOA board, and even promised we’d vote for them. Funny thing – they never did. They wanted to complain, and they wanted us to do what they thought was best, but they didn’t want to do the work themselves.Yes, America is a democracy. (More precisely, a democratic republic.) That means if you don’t like how things are being run but don’t vote or take any other action to change things, you lose a lot of your moral authority to complain. As a friend of mine says, “democracy means having to live with things which really piss you off.”

So much for the plan to draw blood zombies tearing out the intestines of a werewolf that has a spider’s head.