COFFEE KLATSCH - When you Live at the Gate

Sorry if you haven't been able to reach this post - I had major problems and took a few hours to fix this baby/ Have a great weekend and hope you'll have a coffee klatch like this one! And I'll be back Tuesday!

When I lived in Germany, we used to have Kaffee Klatsch (coffee chat) every weekend. We had the table full of scrumptious cakes, pastries, and coffee and tea. It would last all afternoon, sometimes into the evening. Obviously at dinner time everyone was still filled up.

My following conversation would be typical for a Kaffee Klatsch!

This is a tonque-in-cheek account of a somewhat paranoid gatekeeper.

I'm sure you want to know what it is like at my new condo and what it is to live at a gated community, since most of you probably don't.
(A condo, short for condiminium is a little bigger than apartment. Buildings are mostly one or two stories high. With the latter one, in the USA, there is a community building of washers and dryers. Condo's have their own individual ones.)

Basically it is a residential area surrounded by a gate, that opens with a code. Hubby calls it"the compound." Landscaping and upkeep of the buildings are controlled by a house association.

This association charges $400 per month!!! When you leave your car parked outside the gate at night, you get a warning the first time, and the second time you get a (traffic) ticket. For all the above reasons, I don't know if I can get used to it, and live here for the rest of my life.

No one employed me as a gate keeper, but when you can't help but seeing the weekly activities at the gates, the tendency is to take the task upon oneself to become one! In front of my kitchen window is a smaller gate and on the side of the condo is the fire lane, leading up to the main gate where all the cars go through, provided they know the code! 

Hubby discovered quickly that people had tweaked the smaller gate in front of our kitchen window, so they could get through it without a key.

Problem was that the iron gate was dangerously hanging on one hinge. I would not want this gate crashing on my toes!! I am not that paranoid that I don't feel safe without that locked gate. Anyway, several times the workers attempted to fix the gate, but it took a full month before the lock worked.

It was quite amusing what happened when the only way to get through the gate was with a key. One time a man in his late thirtys dressed in nice office clothes parked his car, and came lo and behold, up to the gate.

Wished I had video'd how he got up on the lower ledge of the gate, tried to put his arm all the way to the inside to open the lock. It took him 5 min.

Others called out for help to get other people to open the gate for them. I had decided that I would charge a fee if they wanted me to do it!

A tell-tale that the condo had been unoccupied for some time  was that when people came through this gate they would stare right in my kitchen, even when I would stand in front doing dishes!
I am not easily intimidated, so I would stare right back. With the nosy ones, I would pause my work and keep staring till they had passed my condo.  Eventually everyone got the message.
Traffic has drastically reduced! The ones who come through the gate now, look sideways.

Anyway, I'm crocheting a curtain for this window, to have more privacy at night when the lights are on, since they could see even into the living room.

On the other side of this white fence is the fire lane. 

This would give us more privacy we thought.

Boy, were we wrong! This lane leads up to the main gate, so some cars came barreling through the fire lane, stop very close to the code box, so they would not have get out of the car, to push in the code. This means that they forgot or lost their remote control for the gate!

Then there are people who think this lane is handy for extra reading, chatting or texting on the cell phone, preferrably right in front of my window while they have the engine running. When that happens, I go outside, walk up to the fence, put my hands on the bars like a monkey in the zoo, to look at the car and their license plate.

Not that I read it, but I'm making use of non-verbal communication. And people, it works! When it dawns on them what I'm doing, they don't know how fast to speed off!

I know I'm naughty, but I like my privacy like everyone else.

These happenings also greatly reduced after a month living here.

Yesterday I was painting for two and a half hours on my deck outside, on the side of this fire lane with a view on the main gate, and only two pedestrians came by, whispering, because they saw me paint.

We'll see if I can get used to it.