We attended our first HOA meeting tonight. We don’t live in a condo, and we’re not a gated community, so it seems weird to me to even have an HOA, but we do, and they were meeting, so we went.

When we lived in our townhouse in San Jose, there were only six homeowners, so we were all on the board, and we had perfunctory meetins every month that amounted to, “The gardeners suck, let’s yell at them, stop parking in the fire lane, who wants to be president next?”

The meeting we went to last was nothing like those informat meetings in California. It was, in fact, much more like the Town Meetings on The Gilmore Girls, full of eccentric characters who bickered with each other, but since our ‘neighborhood’ consists of between 2300 and 2400 homes, I guess that makes sense.

I haven’t observed the characters, or their bickering, enough to adequately describe them, and the meeting room at the library had the a/c set to “arctic,” so what energy I was expending was used for maintaining the minimum body temperature needed to survive, and not really on paying attention, but much of it amused me.

These people need help, but I don’t really want to volunteer for anything that requires being on a committee – because after seeing the sizes of soft drinks here in Texas, I’m terrified that the “camels” these people create would be big enough that one bowel movement would obliterate a city block.

(The reference here is, for the two people who don’t get it, to the notion that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.)

I volunteered to write for the newsletter.
I said ‘yay’ and ‘aye’ and ‘nay’ when appropriate.

But mostly I sat there shivering and thinking, “This would be more fun with coffee, and a better script.”