Homeowner dissociation

Someone in my neighborhood has waaaaay too much time on their hands.

We live in a deed-restricted community. Now, in theory deed restrictions seem like a good thing - it cuts down on junker cars in people's yards, and houses painted garish colors. But our homeowner's association seems to have a knack for nitpicking. We've gotten letters over trivial things like our fence needing cleaning, or that our grass was a little bit brown (before the rainy season). Now, in these instances we were by no means the only offender - there were others with dirtier fences or browner grass. I presume they got nastygrams as well.

Yesterday we received a letter saying that we were in violation of one of the restrictions - keeping our driveway and sidewalk in good repair. And that if we didn't deal with it immediately, they threatened legal action. Confused, I wandered outside to see what they were griping about this time. There was nothing obvious to me - sidewalk and driveway looked fine, if a little wet from the rain.

I took another look, and noticed both places had hairline cracks, the kind concrete often gets when it settles. I started to get a bit annoyed, and was really hoping that they weren't expecting us to fix cracks. It wouldn't surprise me, but I was hoping that wasn't the case. So after much shuffling of papers to find the number, I call the president of the homeowner's association to clarify what we were expected to do.

Our name and house number didn't stand out to him when I called, which is a good sign. Obviously we must have made the Nit of the Week list, and were not a major offender. He said if we had rust or mildew or something on our walks to clean it off - that's all.

So the whole point of the letter was that they want us to clean our walks. I don't know why they didn't just say so in the letter, but cleaning our walks we can do.

But I still think someone needs to get a life.