cindy's world

Yesterday, we had our homeowners association meeting at 7:30p. And it ended at 9:15p. I got to clear up the roofing misunderstanding with the people who were there, who questioned me because they had the COMPLETELY wrong idea about how contributions to an association responsibility such as repairing my roof worked. They thought I never contributed but I’m asking THEM to. Where the hell did they get that?! Apparently the secretary was a total moron when she talked to them on the phone about it.

Speaking of the moronic secretary, she not only resigned, but also refused to attend the meeting and return any email or calls about needing her to attend or participate. She also never gave HER contribution to my roofing, which I now know, because in the spirit of if-you-want-anything-done-right-you-gotta-do-it-yourself (and the thunderous silence of people volunteering when it was announced we need a new acting secretary), I am now acting secretary of our association. We also have a new president now, a young Asian guy, new neighbor, whom I’ve met before and totally respect as he seems to not only be intelligent, proactive but also sensible and eager to get to the bottom of “what the hell is wrong with this association and its funding issues?”.

Time to whip this association and its CC&Rs into shape.

Monday was St. Patrick’s Day, which we’d totally forgotten about until Mr. W and I wandered the 1.3 miles over to downtown Sunnyvale from Diana’s pad and saw Murphy Avenue completely decked out in green. It was only noon, and there were patrons in green wigs, green plastic bead necklaces, green shamrock sunglasses, green clothing, sitting outside this restaurant- and bar-lined street enjoying the day. It seemed like every bar there was an Irish pub, and most restaurants Indian.

We selected Scruffy Murphy’s Irish Pub & Restaurant, and walked into the very crowded parlor. We opted to eat upstairs where there were less people, and ordered off their special St. Patrick’s Day menu. I had corned beef and cabbage (delicious) and Mr. W had a lamb stew. He also had a green beer (Harps Lager) and I wasn’t as daring with my Bailey’s Irish Cream on the rocks. We put on our green beads and shamrock sunglasses and walked back to Diana’s, where we took a nap. (She was at work.) Then we got up and drove out to the beautiful Hakone Gardens in nearby Saratoga. (One of the funny things about NorCal is that we think everything’s really close, within 10 miles away from Diana’s, but to people who live there, we went far.) A few scenes from the cinematographically-acclaimed film “Memoirs of a Geisha” were filmed there. I loved that garden. I thought it kicked our wedding venue Japanese garden’s ass, and one of my favorite things about this garden, aside from its beauty from every angle, is that it allows visitors to go on each footpath and go exploring. I found some discreet sights of bamboo, flowers, zen gardens and hidden seats, stunning views that continued to take my breath away as I turned angles. Mr. W took some photos, but I was disappointed how the photos could not come close to doing the sights justice.

Aside from attending Jimmy’s wedding, the other thing I absolutely HAD to do on this trip was to visit Mel’s frozen yogurt shop, a new business venture of hers. We made plans to meet up with Dardy on the same street (which is like Restaurant Row), parked at the start of Castro St. in Mountain View (yes, 10 minutes away). Mr. W and I wandered by the shop first, saw Mel and chatted with her a few minutes, I sampled a couple flavors, and we walked off to meet Dardy for ramen at Maru Ichi restaurant. I kept feeling like I was having celebrity sightings this whole trip, as we’d drive by places I read about on my NorCal friends’ blogs but had never visited myself. I got all stupidly excited when I spotted HC Dumpling, too, one of Dardy’s other favorites. I thoroughly enjoyed my miso ramen (dude, that ramen’s messy! it’s impossible to eat the stuff without spraying droplets of soup everywhere unless you painstakingly wind noodles onto the soup spoon and then put the whole spoon in your mouth, which I did for awhile until I got too hungry for the slow process.), and then we walked to Mel’s shop, Yogurt Fantasy.

I’d heard that her yogurt texture is different from PinkBerry or other yogurt places, and it’s true! Her yogurt is sooo creamy and rich tasting. It doesn’t just liquify and dissolve right away. Her flavors are also very true to their name; my blueberry tart was very blueberry-y, and paired with the chocolate, I felt like I was in taste bud heaven. It was the perfect nightcap before we returned to Diana’s place where she was again back at her dining table working away (impending deadline). She’d passed on dinner to stay at home and work, opting to eat Jimmy’s banquet leftovers with Jen who was due to arrive after work. She worked late into the night while I stayed and chatted with her a bit until I felt too guilty for stealing her time and went off to bed myself. Her boyfriend also stopped by late to visit, having just left the office himself. Lawyers!

Dwaine and I have launched a search for our high school German teacher, Mr. Finn Englyng. We both started taking his class in 8th grade, being bussed over from our junior high to the local high school for 6th period, and continued through to our senior year in high school. He was such an influencial teacher to both of us, that we tried to look him up in our high school’s website so that we could stop in and visit him at school one of these days. He wasn’t listed as a teacher anymore. I told Dwaine it’s okay, as I had Mr. Englyng’s email address and would write to him that way. But my email to him got kicked back the next day. I spent much of the next morning on the internet searching for Mr. Englyng, and was able to find another email address for him from a helpful message he’d posted on a teacher’s online forum in 1996. I forwarded the original email to this new address, and minutes later, that got kicked back as well. Shit. The latest thing I could find on him was something to do with an educational pilot program he, along with 6 other teachers, had tried to launch which finally succeeded according to the 2006 write-up. I could find nothing after that. I even called our school district administrative offices and spoke to someone in human resources; she put me on hold but 5 minutes later my call somehow transferred to the main menu again. Exasperated, I hung up.

Where are you, Mr. Englyng? I’m going to keep searching until I get an answer. Dwaine brought up a health concern that I didn’t know about — Mr. Englyng is diabetic. We hope he retired and is in good health enjoying his free time at home. You can tell he made an imprint on me because my “quotes” page has things he’d said that had stayed with me all these many years.

I heard on the news this morning that one day, a woman went into her boyfriend’s home’s bathroom, and then just didn’t come out. He brought her food and water to the bathroom, for TWO YEARS, she wouldn’t come out of the bathroom, and no one knows why. And then one day recently, he finally called the cops about it. The cops came out to his house to get the woman, and found that she had been on the toilet seat for so long that her skin had grown around the toilet seat, and they had to surgically remove her ass from the toilet seat. Now the boyfriend is facing criminal charges for waiting so long to call for help or for the cops to investigate.

I have SO many questions about this.

I heard from my ghost today in a brief, 2-lined email.

Been a really long time… Just wanted to see how you were doing Cindy

Guess he never googled me or he would’ve found this blog.

Rock Band (the multi-player game for PlayStation3 and XBox360) has been the topic on a few of the blogs I read lately. Lotsa people are jumping on the Rock Bandwagon. Koinkidinkally, my cousin Mark from Canada got a hold of me earlier, and we had the following conversation about Rock Band:

Mark: Hey I finally got around to trying the multiplayer in Donkey Konga, fun times! Also, Rock Band rules!
me: Rock Band is HARD. We were just talking about it on my friends Mike & Christi’s blog.
Mark: YA ROCK BAND IS AWESOME, not that hard! Well maybe. Depends on what difficulty you play it on. I sang Radiohead’s Creep 100% on medium! You’ve played it?
me: Yeah, it’s a lot harder than guitar hero. You have to hit it exactly on the mark or you’re scored really low. I don’t know why they make it so hard.
Mark: Really? Everyone says Guitar Hero is harder… well except for the fact that there’s more of a window for a mistake when you hit it. But there are more buttons to hit in Guitar Hero, like they come up faster and with more.. at least on hard.
me: Hard has 5 buttons. But it doesn’t demand such precision. You don’t fail so fast/easily. Rock Band, 1/3 way thru the song on easy, you fail cuz you didn’t hit them all PRECISELY on the MILLISECOND they want you to.
Mark: !!! :O On easy it’s soooo easy!
me: It may also be hard for me cuz I never know any of the songs. So I have to “read” the screen.
Mark: :O You don’t know the rock classics? Guitar Hero is supposed to be tougher cause they make you hit a lot of buttons really fast. You should sing! That’s fun too, and drumming is wickkkkkedd!!
me: I can’t drum. Too many things my body isn’t used to doing/responding to.
Mark: Hey did you at least have fun while losing at the songs?
me: No, it was freaking stressful. Cuz I was really good at GH, so I couldn’t understand what the prob was w/RB.
Mark: Wow, all my friends who were awesome at Guitar Hero found RB to be too easy…Hrm…If you’re playing on an HD TV, sometimes the calibration is off, so it LOOKs like you’re hitting the button but it’s really off. So it’s really frustrating… my friend had an issue with that.
me: But everyone else I know in CA has the same opinion as me. RB is harder cuz it demands more precision.
Mark: Wowzers! It’s like the opposite of Toronto, haha.
*some time passes*
Mark: You know what, I’m reading up on it now and it’s the same as what you said. So Guitar Hero throws more notes at you, but the accuracy is not as tight. Where Rock Band is more realistic, with less notes but forcing you to be more accurate.
me: ah HA. That means that your friends in Canada are freaks. RB was frustrating for me cuz I was like, “WTF, I HIT the damn notes, why are they failing me?!”
Mark: Awww, you gotta download the music and listen!
me: I don’t really like rock.
Mark: Fair enough.
me: if they could figure out a Hip Hop Band, I’d be SO ALL OVER that.
Mark: We were talking about that! I was talking about that with friends. But hey they patented the name “DJ Hero”. I’m excited! Really though all they have to do is add a keyboard to the game, and blizzkapow it’s there.
me: And a record scratcher DJ station.
Mark: Hells yes. I’m in.
me: And all the karaoke part entails is someone spitting into the mike rhythmically. Ptth, ph ph ptthhhh!

WELL?! All you game programmers, GET ON IT!!!

Smart-Dressed Man: A woman who bought my real estate system bought this home pictured here for, believe it or not, $387. She got it as a government foreclosure, moved her family in, and they are now living free and clear with not one payment to make on it, ever.
Blonde Woman: Wow! Three hundred…and eighty-seven dollars? So she could turn it around and sell it for a lot more.
Smart-Dressed Man: That’s right. With my system, you can buy a house for literally pennies on the dollar, and live in it free and clear, never having to make a payment on it, or sell it on the market for the full estimated value, or get rich using it as a cash-flowing rental.
Inserted Testimonial of a Man: I bought the real estate system, read through it, and then bought ten properties, the lowest at $110 and the highest at $750, and I turned around and sold them for market price. I’ve made a huge profit of $110,000. And not a lot of people know about these government foreclosures and repossessions.
Blonde Woman: Wow! A hundred and ten thousand dollars! That’s a lot of money.
Smart-Dressed Man: This property pictured here has a market value of $120,000.
Blonde Woman: I believe it. It’s a beautiful house in a great neighborhood. There are a lot of expensive properties in that area.
Smart-Dressed Man: Can you believe, that someone using my system bought this house for $358?
Blonde Woman: That’s amazing!

Okay, so my question is, WHERE THE HELL ARE THESE PEOPLE selling these properties at, and WHY are they airing this infomercial in Southern California? Are they KIDDING? They may as well advertise dung beetle shish-kabobs for the same relevance in this market.

I was reading Wilco’s recent post about Super Tuesday and the primaries election (he actually has photos of the ballots when he went to go vote; if he took these himself I can’t believe they let you walk in with a camera), and it reminded me of a conversation I had with Dwaine a year ago in my living room.

Dwaine: Obama is not going to be elected.
Me: You think the country isn’t ready for a black president?
Dwaine: I think the country is more ready for a female president than a black president.
Me: Really!

Although Barack Obama won more states than Hillary Clinton yesterday, Hillary Clinton got the states with more delegates, which is more important in the big picture. One of these states is California. Damn it, damn it.

Despite my opinion about these two candidates and their neck-to-neck race to be front runner for the Democratic party, I was disheartened by the way Obama has presented himself to the average public voter. That thing when Hillary Clinton extended her hand to Obama for a handshake and Obama turned his back to her at the media-heavy State of the Union Address by President Bush on January 28, that was captured in photographs and talked about everywhere. Also, a local but widely-syndicated radio station, 102.7 KIIS FM on the morning show hosted by Ryan Seacrest, invited Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney to come on air the morning of Super Tuesday to address the sector of the public who listen to pop radio on weekday mornings. The only one who accepted the invitation and did address these voters was Hillary Clinton. Obama’s people said he was too busy to call the radio station.

*sigh*

I think I’ve generated some positive karma in the past 24 hours or so. Yesterday after work, I went over to Vicky’s so we can have a tax filing party. By that I mean we sat there on our laptops in her living room and I did my parents’ taxes while she did hers and then when her boyfriend arrived home, she did his. I left my TurboTax there with her in case she decided to be nice and do her parents’ taxes, too. Haha. We were tax-filing fiends until midnight, when I left to go home.

After I arrived home, I made 4 separate trips from my bedroom upstairs to the the garage downstairs to haul down the four heavy filled-to-the-brim trash bags plus one big box of clothes that I had cleaned out of my closets, with Gym Trainee’s help, last year. (You can read about those antics here.) I was going to donate them but didn’t get around to it, which was a good thing because yesterday I received this email from a coworker:

The brother of a dear friend of mine lost his home to a fire. He was renting and did not have renter’s insurance. He and his 3 children literally ran out of the house with just the clothes on their back. My girlfriend, Irene, and her husband, Matthew, have taken them in so they can get back on their feet.

So if you have any old clothes lying around ready to go to Goodwill, please consider bringing them to work and I will deliver them to Irene and Matthew to give to their niece and nephews. If you can help, it would surely be appreciated. If you do not have children’s clothing, as you do not have small kids, you can help by just keeping them in your prayers.

I wrote back to her:
I have 3 giant trash-bags full of old clothes. They were from the ’90s so that was my “dress like a boy in big baggy clothes” stage (in high school). There may be things in there that could be unisex, especially because of their oversized nature and my androgynous taste at the time. The clothes are clean and washed; I had simply cleaned out my closets last year and hadn’t gotten around to getting the clothes to goodwill yet.

I guess I had more clothes than I’d remembered. Anyway, we just did the trunk-to-trunk switch a few minutes ago. My coworker was shocked how much clothing I had. I told her I had to fight Dodo for them, too, because he wanted to play with the plastic bags and chew on the plastic drawstrings. There are tiny puncture marks and tooth marks on the tops of several bags.

I met with the 2nd roofer yesterday. He was nice and professional and had the same proposals as the first roofer. I’ll get an estimate in a day or two. Meanwhile, I find out this is what’s been happening with my retarded association…

I’ve been keeping the 3 officers of the association updated about estimates and appointments and such. The secretary, a chick new-ish to the neighborhood, wrote back that she doesn’t think the other homeowners would want to pay for my roof repairs since it’s not their problem, and that the roofs are pretty new. I wrote back to her, CCing the other officers who have lived there longer than even I have, explaining that
1. it is the Association’s responsibility to maintain and repair the external structure of the houses, i.e. the roof;
2. when the Association doesn’t have enough money in its reserves to pay for necessary repairs, the homeowners must and have always contribute equally to beef up the reserves, which is then used for whatever repairs are needed;
3. that in ’05 and ’06, when several leaks were found in the 11 attached units which shared one long roof, EVERY HOMEOWNER, including myself, contributed $1300 to beef up the reserve in order to replace those roofs, but MY roof wasn’t touched because it didn’t leak at the time;
4. NOW that my roof is leaking, and again there are no reserves in the Association, all homeowners need to again contribute to beef up the funds so the Association can do its job and repair my roof. It would come out to about $300 per homeowner, much nicer than the former $1300.

She seemed to understand, and I requested that when she writes the letter to request money from the homeowners, that she explain this so people don’t get mad at me and think I’m making them pay for an unnecessary new roof; that my roof was never changed when theirs was. The treasurer and president wrote back to the emails, CCing her and me, agreeing with my statement of the facts and history.

So days go by and I see another email from the treasurer urging the secretary chick to write the request letter ASAP. More days go by. I never receive a letter. And then YESTERDAY, in my mailbox, I see a short letter the secretary (i.e. moron) wrote to everyone that she also gave me a copy of, which said that she’s writing the letter at the treasurer’s request, and that she called the homeowners last week to discuss the roofing problem of my unit, and then she typed in bold that according to the treasurer, the $300 must be paid by each homeowner as soon as possible or I (yes, ME, Cindy) may “suit the association.”

WTF?! I’d written her 2 emails requesting her to nicely explain the situation so that people wouldn’t be upset about having to pay their contribution, practically wrote the letter for her in an email, and she writes them a THREAT?! That I was going to sue my neighbors?! Since she claimed that this was according to the treasurer, I called him.

I hate calling the treasurer, btw, as his wife always picks up the phone and is a major bitch. Anyway, I finally get thru her ridiculous screening process and speak to the treasurer about the letter I received, saying that I’m sure everyone is actually MAD at me now, and he said that he can’t believe how ridiculous this secretary is and tells me what happened was that instead of writing a letter to everyone, she CALLED them so there’s no documentation, we don’t even know what she told people, and then told the treasurer in an email that people don’t want to pay. The treasurer’s response to her email was that she should’ve sent them letters, not called them, and that they have to pay because it’s the responsibility of the Association to take care of it, of which everyone is part, and that if the Association doesn’t take care of the roofing, I have a right to sue. So she took what he said and wrote THAT letter to everyone. I couldn’t believe it.

The treasurer comforted me on the phone and said that he’d already written another letter that he will mail to everyone to explain things correctly, and not to worry. He then forwarded their email exchange to me to keep me in the loop. Prepare for a jaw drop…

The secretary:
Rather than sending or delivering any letters regarding the roof repairs for Unit [#], I called the residents/tenants in our building. So far 4 residents/tenants have stated they will not give the $300.00 you asked me to request. I’m waiting to hear from the other 4 units (voice messages were left Thurs. 1/24/08 for each of those residents/tenants). The following comments were made: “I am not going to pay for someone else’s repairs.” “Have [Cindy] take up her situation with the original contractor.” “She waited too long to take care of the problem.” “If [Cindy] gave $1300.00 to the association & her roof was not repaired, then it is up to the association to give her that money back.” My understanding from the last statement is that the person who was in charge of collecting the money back in 05-06 should not have used [Cindy]’s money if no service was being provided. According to the resident/tenant who stated this, [Cindy]’s money should have been put aside until she needed the service provided.

Treasurer’s response:
Making phone calls is no documentary proof of anything we do. Members should be informed by letter only. We all agree that unit [#] is part of our association and she had been paying all her association dues in time.
When we put new roof for our 11 units, it was not necessary to change for unit [#] as it had no problem at that time. But as she was member of association we had to collect from her and she did pay her share. Now if she has problem with her roof, it is responsibility of association, all members, to get her roof fixed. I fear, if we do not fix her roof and she is entitle to file law suit against association (all members) and we all have to get her roof fixed. Not only that, she could claim other damages also to get her ceiling repaired if we do not get her roof fixed.”

I wrote back to the treasurer after reading this:
Thank you for forwarding this, [Treasurer]. It is clear from what [Secretary] stated the other homeowners’ responses are, that they do not understand the situation properly. Their opinions that I waited too long (which I strongly disagree with; the leaks were reported the DAY that I discovered them, and estimates were obtained as quickly as the contractors were able to provide the appointments) or that my money should not have been used for the other 11 units’ roofing work are irrelevant to the situation at hand. Of course there’s no way of knowing what was explained to them or not in [Secretary]’s phone calls.
I think what you suggested in our phone call yesterday may be necessary with responses like these; we should turn over our association to an outside management company and have everyone pay higher dues because they are unwilling to allow for a self-managed association.
I still thank you for writing a separate letter to the homeowners to properly explain the situation, and look forward to receiving it.

I’m fucking tactful! Can I die now?