Weeds and other ugly things

Okay, I am actually having to cut down all of my honeysuckle on my fence. This really sucks. This is a lot of work. I'm doing a lot of work to make something look ugly. I don't really enjoy doing this much work to make things pretty, and here I am being ordered to do something to make things ugly.

After pointing out that there was no such rule saying that we could not grow vines on our fences, I was told that it wasn't in the rule book but instead in the contract itself. There's a paragraph about cutting the grass and such, and it says not to allow trees to grow in the fence and not to have tall grass around the fence and not to allow vines to grow on or in the fence. So that looks to me I promised not to have weeds on the fence, not that I promised not to grow flowers. I don't think that anyone has ever claimed that it was meant to keep people from having honeysuckle and roses and such. If that was meant, people either stopped reading it that way, or a general exception to the rule was made for certain plants, or specific exceptions to the rule were made for certain people. Anyway, the honeysuckle was there on the fence when I paid to move in, and that was one of the reasons (small reason, but without the plants I liked I might not have taken the place) we picked this place over others. And the honeysuckle was there for decades before I had the place, and it has been there for more than five years since I've lived here, and suddenly now I'm being told that it has to go. Other people are not being told to remove their honeysuckle. Just some of us.

This is ordered by a board member who is currently acting manager. Unfortunately, this is one of the guys that I voted for last year. If the guy running against him had just sent out flyers, we might not have to deal with this guy. But that isn't what happened.

Another guy that we elected also turned out to be a mistake. He was actively trying to get a woman evicted. This woman has lived here more than twenty years, but she was asked to leave for reasons that make no sense to me. Apparently, the real reason that someone wanted her gone was so that her house would be vacant for friends of board members. But, you can't evict someone for that, you have to have something else going on, like not paying rent, and that wasn't it. She was "violating regulations." Everyone violates a regulation now and then, but you don't usually evict people for that.

Apparently, one of the violations was that she had someone living with her who wasn't immediate family. I've always thought that part of the rules was about not renting the house out for profit, not that you couldn't have roommates or have people stay at your house rather than leave it vacant for long periods of time. But technically, this is what I agreed to. Hopefully, the rule will change after we elect the almost evicted woman to the board.

So, I will vote for this woman, and my buddy B, and on his advice I also plan to vote for D, who added to the board several months ago after someone else resigned. There six other people running, at least one of them is a current board member, and at least one other is a former board member. But I don't know much about the others.

Anyway, the elections will be Saturday. In the past we have been able to vote on two or three days, so I am wondering about the change, and I hope that we don't lose people because of it being on a weekend. But at least there will not be this argument about whether or not the ballot box was put in the safe on nights between voting days.

Okay, it has been a few days since I started writing this, and a lot has happened. I got a letter warning me not to vote for my buddy B or either of the other two he advised me to vote for. Everyone in the place got one of these letters, including my buddy B and the other people we are warned about in the letter. In the letter, several people are lumped together as being bad guys conspiring against the rest of us, and while I'll agree with some of it, I find it hard to believe that most of the people mentioned in this letter even get along with each other, much less that they have banded together to do evil to the rest of us. Like, I don't think that the woman who was nearly evicted is planning anything with the guy who spoke to the judge about getting her evicted. And I don't think that my buddy B could be in on anything with the woman who requested that we all spy on each other and report people who have violated regulations, since my buddy B is the one who told me about that in the first place.

But I don't know, maybe my buddy B is just telling me what I want to hear and says something totally different to other people.

What I really want to know is how to get rid of M. I thought my buddy B was the one to do that (or at least make him tone it down a bit), but after hearing other people speak there are others running for the board who want him gone even more than I do. Now it sounds like the main person who wants M gone is someone who my buddy is always butting heads with.

Now, I am going to vote for three people, so I suppose that I could vote for this guy and my buddy and a third person, rather than cast all three votes for one side or the other.

There are still three other people running. One person used to be on the board, but I heard that he bought another house and will soon be leaving anyway. So I don't see why that person is running if he isn't going to be around for more than a couple of meetings. Of course, he could have bought a house that he doesn't actually plan to move to and could stay here, but I don't think so. So I think that a vote for that guy would be a totally wasted vote anyway. Another person running probably isn't really running anymore, as I've seen a sign in her yard telling people to vote for someone else. I don't like her. I wouldn't vote for her anyway. The third other person running is someone that I don't know at all. I just got a flyer from him yesterday that said he wasn't on either side, and that is a major reason that we should vote for him, that he would consider each issue on it's own and not just vote with one group or the other.

So I could vote for this guy who isn't on a side and my buddy and the guy that my buddy doesn't like. But somehow that doesn't seem like a good idea either.

Now I really don't know what to do. But I can't not vote, and I can't see not voting for my buddy. I'm just not sure now what to do about the other two votes.