Shortly after that cat kerfuffle the condo board president died. I guess he was a nice enough guy, people speak well of him, but not so much his wife Donna who took over and started a reign of terror. Well she spent our money like water renovating our lobbies, which were perfectly fine the way they are, at a great cost, and she spent money here and she spent money there and there was nothing to do to stop her because she had a majority on the board who would always vote her way. And there was nothing that could be done to stop her, except that she was up for election.
Surely some revolution was at hand, surely the Clean Slate was at hand. I wasn't really connected at this time. After like twenty-five years of living here I knew a few people on my floor, and there were maybe a handful who I nodded at in the hallways but really didn't know. But there was a Marina City facebook page that I was a follower of and it took up the case of the Clean Slate. I was on the periphery of this. I went to a couple of meetings and maybe I posted two or three times on that facebook page, but I was there the day the vote was held and evil queen Donna was voted out along with her lackeys.
You know there had been some talk of looking into the questionable activities of the evil queen. A lot of valuable stuff was torn out of the lobbies during the renovations and to this day nobody knows what became of them. There was some talk of setting her adrift on a gasoline-soaked boat in the river and shooting fire arrows at her. Okay that was just me talking. In any event nothing like that happened once the Clean Slate took power. I have to think that, now that they were the top dogs, they didn't want to set any precedence for former board presidents and members.
Since then I have become more active in condo activities. I have my monthly Art Club (I had envisioned it as a bunch of arty types pursuing their various arts and having high-toned conversations about esthetics, but the reality has turned out to be me and two or three regulars mostly gossiping ) and every year I have an Eggstravaganza (eggs an dye and Easter candy provided), and a Punkin Palooza (pumpkins and carving tools and Halloween candy provided), and sometimes I go to board meetings.
Late last fall the notices for the whites only lights came up in the elevators. I was all like WTF, but then I noticed that people were still shining their multi colored lights and nothing was apparently being done about it, and I thought well, the board has realized the error of their ways and are just not enforcing it. Well ok, I could live with that. But then this spring the announcements went up that people would be penalized for having multi colored lights, that got my attention.
What I have learned from the board is that they didn't enforce their whites only rule earlier was that it was newly promulgated and Christmas was getting into gear and they thought they would put it off until next year. A good point could be made, and I have made it, that if they didn't enforce it last year they could just as easily not enforce it this year, or forever. But the board gets all authoritarian and says, no, rules must be enforced. I look around and I see all sorts of rules not being enforced, but I don't bring that up, because there are a lot of them and just one of me and I don't know their ways and I just want to get this little thing (colored lights at Christmas) done and it's not going to help my case if I piss them off.
In answer to Beagles's question of why don't I just put up my lights, it's because I am afraid of being fined. Also there is the principle of the thing which I will go into in more detail later in this series.
And I totally agree with Beagles that it's better to have a rule against loud noises coming from your apartment than to make a rule that there can be no dogs, or stereos, or anything else. And in fact there already is such a rule.
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