The All-New Bunrab

So, having attended the general meeting portion of the monthly condo board meetings every month since I moved here, I let myself get talked into being appointed as an interim member to fill a vacant spot, at the January meeting. The February meeting, this past Monday, was my first as a board member. I have not finished reading the vast binder of info yet, much less prior year audits and tax returns - I am going to be put in charge of finding a new CPA to do those for this year. (No, I can't do it, even if my CPA license were on active status rather than inactive, because the auditor has to be independent.) Already did some work with the gas billing accounts - an arcane system of submetering and billing, and we can't shut off anyone's gas for nonpayment because the BGE accounts are per building, that's why we have the submetering, and the submetering company doesn't do collection stuff on past due bills, and so on. So I just played with spreadsheets and developed a quick system of filtering out which accounts should be sent nasty letters as of the current month, which accounts should be referred to legal action because they're over 90 days, and also highlights a few other kinds of problems - people with zero usage this month even though as far as we know the unit's not vacant, what's that about? and people with huge single-month bills more than twice the average for that size unit. Nobody else thinks we should do anything about those people, they're just focused on collection, but sometime down the road I hope to talk the board into being proactive in helping people not get behind in the first place, by having more control and awareness of their energy usage.

Anyway, this past Monday night was my first board meeting, as I said. And most of the way through the meeting, after we had already allocated a bunch of tasks, whoop! Office manager hands in her resignation. (Note I am not naming names, either of her or of the condo association.) Effective next week. So, tonight, emergency meeting, to discuss whether to bribe her with more money (but does that merely postpone the issue of someone who is obviously unhappy here, and who would, if she accepted that, be reneging on the other job she supposedly had accepted?) or hire someone new and if so how and how fast.

Deep end of the pool here, peeps. Good thing I'm reasonably fast at learning to swim.

ETA:
The board decided to offer her lots more money, and we also got more other stuff done than we had on Monday - it's much easier to get moving on stuff when we don't have to wait for all the residents to speak up and then get herded out so that we can have just the board. We got some maintenance decisions made - board members are going to be on call at night for emergencies for a few weeks while office manager struggles with family problems - we're rotating weeks, and we hope that by the time 4 people have each spent a week getting emergency calls from residents at night that aren't really emergencies, we will have (a) figured out a better way to get through to people that maintenance issues are not 2 a.m. emergencies, and (b) figured out a different way to deal with the late-night calls that will come in anyway. The real problem is people who are renting their units from owners; the renters seem to think that we are an apartment complex and that the office is going to fix their plumbing, electrical, heat, etc. We need to get across to them that there are only 3 things that are enough of an emergency to call anybody at 2 a.m.: fire - in which case they should be calling 911, not our office; smelling gas - ditto 911; and water pouring from the ceiling - which is the only one of the 3 where someone on site needs to respond immediately and see whether the water needs to be shut off because it's a between-units problem, or whether it's something just in their own unit - and whether their idea of water pouring from the ceiling is actually a pinpoint leak in the shower plumbing... No heat is not an emergency on our part; unit owners own their own furnaces and are responsible for repairs. No hot water is not an emergency - it's the complex's responsibility to fix, but it won't be done at 2 a.m., it will be reported to the manager in the morning and a plumber will be called during normal hours. Electrical outages are not an emergency, and anyway they should be calling either their landlord (the owner of the unit), or BG&E. And hurricanes are an emergency, but not one we can do a damn thing about while the hurricane is ongoing. That should cover most things. Water leaks seem to be the most common thing that people call about, and the vast majority of them turn out to be things in the plumbing that belongs to the unit owner, not in the plumbing that belongs to the building.

And I need to get an article written to that effect, only more polite, written for the two-or-three-times-a-year newsletter that goes to all units.

And Friday morning we got my signature added to the bank account, and geez, this is going to be work.

In 2012, the only resolution I made was to remember to call my friend Cindy at least once a week, instead of always waiting for her to call me - I'm really,  really bad about picking up the phone and calling people, but I managed to keep that resolution. Without any resolutions on the subject, I decided just after the first of the year that I really needed to get out from under the burdens of a largish single-family home, so repaired the home, sold the home, bought a condo, moved. So far so good, right? Also good, that I don't think I've mentioned, is that I've lost nearly 25 pounds in the past year, getting my BMI to just under 25 - that is, within normal instead of overweight! Without any resolutions about losing weight!

I whined here about the couple of tachycardia events that screwed up my summer, and then somehow never got around to getting back here. I think, mind you I'm not certain, but I think, that this new year I resolve to write a few more substantive posts here, rather than depending on 3-sentence Facebook updates to be the only way I keep up with friends or organize my thoughts.

( Playing catch-up )
( More stupid heart stuff )

( More than you wanted to know about my finances )

( I have slightly less of too much stuff )

( A visit to Texas )

OK, that's well enough of a ramble and a catch-up. New Year's resolution: keep up with LJ better, keep up with my friends' lives better. It's not all always me, and when it is me, sometimes it's good to share.

When I contracted to buy the condo, the kitchen was in disgusting condition - this was a short sale, and the people living here had not done any maintenance, nor much cleaning, in quite a while, as is typical of such things. So, the day I moved in, I had contractors pull out most of the kitchen, except for the refrigerator and stove which were in adequate working condition and apparently *had* been cleaned within the past couple of years. The counters had been cracked laminate, covered in a couple of layers of Contac paper, and the cabinets had been permanently sticky among other flaws. And this is what I put in:

( New cabinets and counters )

( I've started getting my mug collection up )

Edited to add "before" pictures, which are from the listing, pictures taken while the previous owners still lived there.
( Edited to add "before" pictures )
In the "before" pics, the microwave oven is 3" lower, far too close to the gas stove for safety - the home inspector dinged that one instantly. So when I ripped everything out, I replaced the 15" high "bridge" cabinet with a 12" high one, and thus was able to move the microwave up by three inches, which the inspector says is safe enough though he hates the whole idea of over-the-stove microwaves. Truly, I'd prefer an under-counter one myself, but those are expensive and this kitchen just flat-out doesn't have the counter space to do it.