In my experience you are definitely the exception. Good on ya

There's also a big difference between a condo/townhouse HOA and a suburban neighborhood one. Condo HOAs are focused on maintaining shared facilities and that would otherwise be too expensive for the owners to care for. Suburban HOAs for single family homes are all about enforcing uniformity and control.

If you shingled my house with deep black, I'd call for your removal.

I live in NM, and you'd turn my house into an oven.

Fortunately, my HOA has no restrictions on shingle colors. I chose the whitest once I could get. My HOA is decent, mostly they just deal with the landscape company, and keep people from trashing their own yards. I haven't raked leaves or mowed a lawn in nearly 30 years. My front yard always looks good.

I think the difference is you got handed power/responsibilities nobody wanted and other hoa presidents sought it out for the power

I never had an HOA that wasn't abysmal, so I'd say you are a very good exception.

I think it's one of those roles where you if do it well, no one will notice.

Good on you, bud, I've done the same. I understand the Internet is always in an uproar over HoAs but it's cooperative self governance. In our community we collectively own the land. A good HoA is essential. I have a background in fiscal analysis and budgeting and I can provide my neighbors these skills for a healthier neighborhood.

I'm sure there's some dickhead on the Internet claiming we fined him unjustly for his broken window. He probably won't tell you that it was broken for five years, caused a pipe burst that flooded his widow neighbor's unit and forced her to discard her deceased husband's possessions. Then waited until the following year's frost without acting.

It's a total pain in the ass of a gig and at least 30% of your residents are unpleasable. But the alternative is a working class neighborhood gets run by that one person who's happy to fine for out of season decorations. If motherfuckers stepped up and acted like the board members they want to see, maybe they wouldn't constantly whine about what are, to the majority of them, purely hypothetical tyrants.

Give it time, HOA becoming evil always happens eventually....

Spoiler: You're not

By joining a HOA you already proved you're an asshole though.

Heternormative Overlord Associations are fucking creepy, you telling me some fucking busybody with no life can tell me what colour to paint my fence if I lived in America?

Fuck right off. I thought y'all were the Land of the Free.

Here in Europe, we can do what we want as long as it's within health and safety rules, without some weird stepford cult being like "it's not approved by the council of elders!"

Yea too bad decent people dont lie to their kids enough about things that are just a little evil and make them into huge deals.

...and then the driver didn't signal to turn and the cement truck couldn't stop and crushed the driver to death. Remember kids, be predictable when driving.

I used to think coffee was for men and tea was for women because of the adults in my family’s preferences

There’s a whole group of people near me with this problem (not cars though). I think they may have cracked it this generation around as there’s very few boys.

My mother hates driving and tried to avoid it and my grandma didn't, neither did my aunt until my uncle died in his mid 50s. Never really thought about this until now.

At my uni, we technically have a rule banning pocket knives on campus, but because we have engineering and animal science students on campus, it's not a big deal when you see people carry pocket knives.

That sounds a lot like Albacete and Andalucía with all those navajas, especially the gifting part (Navajas de Albacete are a well-known souvenir here in Spain)

This was me as a kid. An assortment of Swiss Army knives, always available. Finally got one of the good Victorinox ones, and it was my EDC in high school. Totally normal in the redneck town where I grew up. I flew on planes at least twice with one on me, connected as a keychain. No one cared.

The week after 9/11, I was in college in a large coastal city, and a friend that worked at the campus TV station was asking people to be on their "talk show" which was just 3 random students with nothing better to do, and a theatre minor to moderate. Sure enough, 9/11 came up, and everyone was shocked, shocked I tell you, that box cutters made it in the plane.

I said I carried a pocket knife around because it's a tool. And that I had managed to make it on a plane with one before, so it's not that shocking. I had one on me at the time, like one does.

The looks I got - it was like I had told them I invented plane hijackings and was about to murder then all right there. Instantly they were the Us, even the moderator, I was a violent and terrifying Them. With a 3 inch folding blade I wouldn't trust to cut more than a baby bell cheese. Fortunately, literally no one watched the show, but I just thought it was the other 3 people being weird.

Nope. City people just don't expect to do things for themselves a lot I guess. Or something, I'm still not clear on what they're thinking.

Anyway, my EDC these days is a Kershaw tonto blade. Love the big wide stumpiness of it. What's yours?

Europeans in shambles.

Pocket knives should be normalized.

I remember my first pocket knife. My father gave it to me and I immediately checked the sharpness by running my thumb across it. The wrong way. 6 stitches later I learned not to do that. Lol

Hope you don't breathe while in the bathroom

I worry about pooh on my toothbrush. But I got these toothbrush covers instead.

Good instinct but isn't this what bathroom cupboards (the one with the mirror that you put above the sink) are for?

Also close toilet lid when flushing.

You are a scholar. I don't even want other people's toothpaste moisture on my toothbrush

Did you ever hear of the channel S.V. Seeker? Honestly my favourite bit of niche internet drama, I can't even begin to list the crazy shit that went down but basically a madman with zero knowledge of sailing let alone boatbuilding welded together an ill-conceived hulk roughly according to the plans of someone who is himself a nutter; misadventures on the way include pouring a lead keel and poisoning the topsoil if not himself, faking an explosion and resulting traumatic brain injury to learn who his 'real fans' were, and creating possibly the scariest boat I've ever heard of which no doubt will end up on the news one day having becoming a hazard to navigation.

Anyway he's the first person I ever heard of using a poo knife. He was openly advocating the practice, as well as a 'poo nest' to prevent splashback.

This what I came here looking for. That story haunts me every time I go to the bathroom at a friend's house for the first time. I'm just waiting for the day I see a knife next to the toilet.

Apparently super common and a religious thing.

Never thought I'd feel so warm towards a toilet brush before I read that story.

I knew a poop knife family. They had 10 kids though, that might have had something to do with it.

Like replacing the screen door with one with windows, or hanging a new main door?

Did you swap your front door out every summer/winter?

I had a similar experience with steaks and pork chops growing up. My dad liked his steaks well done.

I've cooked some steaks with the understanding that they can be better and they were, especially the one that I accidentally cooked perfectly. That said, I still don't get the hype steaks can get. Yes, it's better when cooked perfectly medium rare, but still not even close to a good curry or a perfectly cooked piece of breaded chicken (if you're thinking like the frozen stuff, you should try eating at a restaurant that makes its own chicken wings or strips, holy fuck is there a difference there, too). The perfectly cooked steak was even better when I put the 2nd piece in a sandwich.

Bros before hoas.

The only way that my spouse and I remotely come close to buying everything we need at the store is by using AnyList and training ourselves to add items to it the very moment we realize we need it. I've pulled out my phone in the middle of a doctor consultation just to add "Cat Litter" to the list, because I know if I didn't do it then, I'd forget, and wouldn't remember again until it was too late and the cats were already in active revolt.

And not just randomly thinking of things.

Figuring out what ingredients need to be used soon.

Then using that to plan out what meals will be made between now and the next shopping trip.

The figuring out what’s needed to make those.

Then figuring out what from that list you already have.

Then subtracting the “already have” list from the combined ingredient list of those planned meals.

Then writing that list down.

My mom's the absolute opposite. I've suggested making lists, and she is vehemently against them for some reason. She'd rather go to the super market, walk up and down every aisle, hoping to remember what she needs. Then when she inevitably forgets something, she just sends me (or one of her other kids, or my dad) to go pick up the thing she forgot. It makes zero sense and does nothing but inconvenience the rest of us just because she refuses to write things down.

Wait... Isn't that exactly what an HOA is?

It's so weird to me that someone saying something so benign and perfectly plausible, if a bit far fetched, but funny whether true or not, gets some people worked up enough to not only not believe them based on nothing but their gut feeling, but to publically announce "yea right! Didn't happen! Nothing ever happens that's not a normal thing for me!"

Nothing ever happens.