People bitch and gripe about things sometimes because it's almost as if they think someone just has to, no matter how ridiculous their reasoning is. At our condo association's last Annual Meeting (where everyone is invited to attend, I even put a friendly little cover letter out to everyone for the event - yes I'm the Secretary on the Board of Directors if you haven't heard yet, and maybe now I regret a little bit expressly saying that but anyway) people were given a copy of the friggin' proposed budget - proposed as in "we can talk about things and discuss them and in the end everyone will vote on it" type of proposed. Hey, yeah, great, landscaping, ohhh, ahhh, eeee, go get 'em, etc. A dozen people just sign their proxy votes and turn them into the board. I should revise the proxy votes for next year's meeting to instead read: I JUST DON'T REALLY CARE ENOUGH ABOUT THIS PLACE TO WASTE AN HOUR TALKING ABOUT IT AND/OR I DON'T REALLY LIKE ANY OF YOU AND DON'T WANT TO SEE YOU. SIGNED_____________________ DATE_________________
We actually voted on the budget - passed. Unanimously. No dissent whatsoever. In the budget - a certain amount earmarked for a landscaping project. I'll tell you that the money put towards this is startlingly lower that what it would be if an outside professional landscaping company did the work, but there is a reason why. A member of the board owns a landscaping company - he has completely donted his time into doing the following: designing a comprehensive plan that revamps everyone's front flower bed - edging is added, some vanity boulders (dear lord. so. fucking. heavy.), a few perennials and if you handed in your special request form a lilac, rhodowhatevers, on and on. You don't hand in your sheet, well fuck you then. (Okay maybe a little harsh but come on, what more do you want. People bitch and friggin gripe incessantly about "not having a say" in what goes on with the association. First of all, let me just tell you that if each and every one of you "had a say" in the business transactions we are required to conduct, we'd go fucking bankrupt. We wouldn't get anything done. We'd sit around and argue whether someone who parks their cars in front of the mailboxes to get their mail instead of walking from their respective places to get it is technically "blocking the main roadways" as we took a formal vote on and said we were going to start towing. For the record, I don't think it's a technical violation, just obnoxiously fucking rude. If you're going to do it, get off your ass. And if you have the stones to sit your ass in the car and start reading your mail, you're 5 minutes away from getting the hose.)
Part of revamping everyone's front bed is digging out all the old shit. We're talking mulch that is like 6 or 7 years old. Disgusting. Roots. My goodness the frigging roots. I am so anti-root now. Dig that shit out. Fill up wheelbarrows full of compost (huh, incidentally shit), dump that in the new beds then turn the existing ground and mix it in with the compost for a nice happy fresh bed for beautiful plants to grow in. (in which to grow? dumb fucking rule.)
Once those beds are ready you conduct the ceremony of removing the boulder from the pile and transporting it to somone's front bed. I'm not going to lie to you: I'm afraid how I'm going to feel tomorrow morning when I wake up. Ooph. So we did a boatload of that today, a ton. Literally. Tomorrow is when all the plantings go in. In between piles of boulders strategically placed throughout the beds. All of it gets mulched in the end. It will be like a little tiny weird piece of heaven.
The point: the guy on the Board used his landscaping company to purchase all of the edging, spikes for the edging, compost, numerous bags of organic fertilizer (oh yes, almost forgot - every bed gets a little how's your father with the organic fertilizer), plantings (ridiculous. absolutely ridiculous how many we got. nuts.), boulders, grass seed, concrete (re-secured all of the main driveways' lamp posts with a bigger base of concrete if it was in the middle of a bed that was dug up), fertilizer, and topsoil at wholesale price. Wholesale. Exactly. And, because he is supervising the project - for free - he hired a few workers who are getting paid $20/hour for their services. The lowest estimate we got from an outside landscaping company (we looked around and got 5 different ones) - $35/hour. And that doesn't even factor in paying regular price for the goods.
This project is about 60% done right now. I've worked many of the days. Solid. I think it looks incredible. A lot of people are taking notice and I think appreciate and support such a vast improvement. But people bitch. "Ah yeah wah wah wah," "why aren't we spending money on other things even though I don't have a clue as to what other thing specifically" type of crap. This place is going to actually look like a real place. Not that it was a shithole before, just barely barely average and ordinary. Like a Junior Varsity Pleasantville.
Extra boulders are going to go along the sidewalk, a border of sorts but more importantly something for goddamn neighborhood dogs to piss on other than are fucking shrubs. Simmer down, I love all dogs and dogs are great yes yes, but there are sooo many other better places for people to let their dogs piss. Come on. A million other places. Telephone poles. They aren't going to grow anymore, they can deal with urine. Hostas, on the other hand. Not so much. So the boulder border. I say pretty hip, we still are on ELEVATED terror alert for crying out loud, so boulder up.
So people are coming around, not that they should have been turned around in the first place. But this is where much of the bitching and griping has been of late - the $500 Special Assessment the board voted in favor of about a month ago. Yep, pissed. But whatever, I was laid off just 3 days before this meeting so people better not dare give me the I don't even want to say it. The Special Assessment isn't for the landscaping, that was already in the budget, it's for this summer's repaving project - all of the main roadways that run through the Association and every unit's individual driveways, with a new black sealant going on the walkways leading up to people's front doors. Some people are kind of pissed, but we've been talking about doing something with the paving for a while now, it is an absolute wreck and a joke right now. But look at the big picture, for $500 look what you got this summer - something that would have costed you I would say between $3,000 and sky is the limit really, depending on where you live and such, maybe $15,000 just for a number. I have to believe that when people see the big picture - the final product when it's all said and done, people won't complain. They can't, they just can't. I honestly might just beat someone into oblivion, okay that was a joke I don't know if PATRIOT ACT bullshit picks that sort of thing up or not. But really. Please. I understand there will be some dissenter, and that it fine. But something is getting done here that hasn't been done in 15 years. Literally. Hook a brother up, there is a lot of good in that. Look at your friggin' property for chrissakes, your primary investment for most of you. This is crazy now, but it is actually worth more now. Big picture. People need to see the big picture. This place was a joke, it is going to be cool now.
The other thing is that this was hard freaking work. Hard ass work. There were only two options: doing the work ourselves like we are at the lowest possible cost or not doing it at all. We would not have been able to have afforded an outside company to do it. It is getting done, and it is going to look incredible. The increased privacy, it's crazy. Boulders are friggin' crazy man.
Not surprisingly, there is a member with whom I have publicly butted heads in the past. We will call him CL ('C' standing for 'Crazy'). CL accosted me one day, about a year and a half ago, because I thought his request to cut an additional windown in his upstairs bedroom would by some crazy act of god would be considered in violation of the bylaw that says you are NOT allowed to change the existing structure of your unit. Crazy me. Anyway, he gave me the "I'm going to get a lawyer and make this place a living hell" line and that is when I put down the broom (literally and figuratively) and actually laughed in his face. He didn't like that. In any event a month or so of my smart-ass smirky stare-down grins he calls me up and wants to apologize. That's right.
In any event, CL's place is at the exact opposite end of the association. Exact. It is like the forces of good versus evil. Hilarious. CL is always bitching about dogs crapping in his yard, so how funny would it be to build this boulder fence along the corner of his place and erect a flagpole with the initial of his last name on it? I think you'd appreciate it more if you knew the guy. He's kind of a little crazy. Whoops, I explained that already.
Sleepy.
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