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October 10, 2006

Homeowners' association nightmares

I stopped guest-blogging over at protein wisdom several weeks ago. I put up a few pretty decent posts, but I got so confused by all the action by the other guests that I decided to sneak out the back door, where no one could see me. My mother has a cartoon on the side of her stove showing a man and woman trying to leave a dinner party by climbing out the window, which would be extremely funny if you knew how my mother and father used to socialize (or not). So I'm not sure it's nature or nurture for me, but I found it really easy to sneak out that ol' door there.

Jeff isn't quite back yet, but he's posted two brief conversations with his homeowners' association covenant. (If you're a reader of his, that won't sound at all strange.) The first had to do with having to get permission for everything from the association. The second, posted today, concerned a rule that you can take out only a single can of garbage each pickup day. What really got me laughing was a comment by ahem, one of the other guest-bloggers:

O, god. Don’t get me started.

When I lived in San Francisco, I was forced to sneak out around at midnight once a week to hide my excess trash in other peoples’ garbage cans. You run through the neighborhood looking here and there for someone with a little spare space in their can.

And people run past you in the dark doing the same thing. Often, I’d come home to find some asshole had abandoned a whole bag of his garbage next to my can, so I’d have to go back out again and find another place for it. You could sit up all night guarding your can. The alternative was to have to haul a can of someone else’s smelly garbage back into your house and keep it for a week.

And try getting rid of an old car. Just try.
I always wondered why garbage can noise was waking me up in the middle of the night on my trips to S.F. Now I know.