I need to give you some background before I continue. The city is arranged by subdivisions. These are small housing groups that are linked by some kind of theme. Ours is very small and the theme is simply the square configuration of the road. There is only one block of homes; only one entrance/exit, and only about 50 homes. My neighborhood growing up was a wood theme. All the street names ended in wood: Teakwood, Buttonwood, Tanglewood, Parkwood. It also had a Chinese theme because one of the first homes built there was built by Chinese immigrants with a lot of money. Their home was of distinct Chinese architecture. I lived next door and everyone in the city new how to get to my home. All I had to say was do you know where the Chinese house in Parkwood is? The front entrance to the neighborhood had a small pagoda with Parkwood written in stylized letters to look Chinese and all the street signs had a pagoda roof on top of the name. Some of the nicer neighborhoods are gated and have accompanying neighborhood accessories such as The Ponds neighborhood which has several small ponds dotted around the 150 or so homes. These neighborhodds have a Home Owners Association (HOA). Each home owner pays dues to the association for maintenance on whatever common areas the neighborhood has. Many have a clubhouse and pool. Ours has a small green area that is a water retention area for times of flooding. Our dues are $35/year. Some homes that we looked at before we bought had dues around $700. These neighborhoods are common in America, but many of my foreign readers may not be familiar with this concept. These are not suburbs; they are subdivisions. In American, a suburb is a smaller city that is virtually connected to a large city. Denver has many such as Cherry Creek, Lakewood, and Centennial. In London, Wimbledon would be considered a suburb.
Back to Fort Collins and its sense of community. The city of Fort Collins gave every neighborhood HOA a voucher to a grocery store, Safeway (we have four or five of them in town) to purchase ice cream, cups, spoons, and napkins. Last night, we hosted the Neighborhood Night Out and served said ice cream to our neighbors. I put flyers on their doors on Friday evening to let everyone know where it was being held this year. We probably had just under 20 families stop by between 18:30 and 20:30. Timothy loved having a half dozen kids running around his back yard and we loved meeting our neighbors. We knew about half that came. It was a great way to host a party because we didn't have to do anything with the inside of the house, no cleaning before and cleaning up after, we didn't have to pay for any of the food, and we didn't have to feel like people didn't like us if they didn't come because it wasn't really our party.
We have basically two generations of owners here. One generation bought their homes in the late '80's early 90's and raised their kids here. These kids are now in high school or at university. The other generation has little kids, like us. We have a few retired couples and a few couples without kids, but most everyone falls into the first two categories. It's funny because even though we have little kids, I'm the same age as most of the people with children in high school/college.
yes, the lady in red and them man in grey have birds on their shoulders
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