1TB of Data, 30,000 photos, Hundreds of Videos and 7 Boxes of Documents

I'm in the process of winding down from my HOA board commitment. I'm putting a lot of stuff into storage and that will free up my home office.

I've got thousands of emails, tens of thousands of photos I took, hundreds of videos, including all of the HOA meetings from 2008 through 2017. Then there are 7 boxes of paper documents, samples of water mains including failed sections, aluminum flashing, carpeting, engineering blue prints and so on.

I accumulated this as a consequence of my job. As our professional manager once said to another board member "Norm doesn't do anything without a reason." He also gave me a brief acknowledgement during the annual meeting, stating: "With Norm, I learned a lot, at times more than I actually wanted to!" Owners and boards fail to comprehend that our management is not our engineer, our project engineer and our accounting firm. These are skills I honed over decades and I was once told that I "was the best systems engineer in the industry."  So I took it upon myself to become even better, and passed as much as I could on to others, to empower them in their lives. So too for our managers, boards and owners.  Those newsletters were written with a purpose.

In the course of my duties, I took on the challenge of learning and mentoring, or "sharing".  I've been that way for decades. That's how one builds successful businesses, particularly those on the "leading edge". In our HOA I took on the challenge of acquiring the knowledge necessary and then using it with my considerable skill so I, and others, could do the best possible job as fiducies.  Some of our board rose to the challenge and others did not. That's the way it is in society.

We are each limited by who we are, by our skills and our knowledge and our condition as human beings. But we can improve and grow. It is a choice. Every day is a choice and that includes how we spend our time.

I put some of my approach, issues and solutions out here in the blog.

Now, as I decompress, it is time to move on.

As a unit owner I'll continue to observe this association, and I'm sure I'll send my suggestions to the board of 2019. Assuming I am here longer, who knows, I may participate to a higher level.

It is important to state that I only actually have lived in my unit for about 25% of the time for several years. I would have been here less, had it not been for my commitment on the board. That commitment I never broke.  I described my efforts at a transition to a business manager yesterday. This is something which I've been orchestrating for more that a year.  She told me she was impressed by my attempt and told me "What you did is unusual."