Admit it. The weeds in your lawn are growing like they’re possessed by the devil, but cutting or killing them didn’t even make your growing, four-page honey-do. You’re just glad the Great Wall of Snow on the sidewalk in front of your house finally disappeared on its own last month. Keeping up with Colorado’s bipolar weather is hard enough, and shoveling your sidewalk seems pointless when most days are sunny, right? At least you finally got around to some overdue spring cleaning. Your homemade signs advertising your upcoming garage sale are on every light pole and stop sign within a four-mile radius.

If this sounds like you, then you might be a code enforcement officer’s worst nightmare. Truth be told, the city’s clean police have probably seen, heard and smelled weirder.

“I wish we would have kept a book,” said Ron Moore, the city’s manager of code enforcement.

If there was a book, it would include frequent offenses such as boats and trailers parked on neighborhood streets, sofas and mattresses on balconies and patios, cars parked on lawns, mounds of trash in backyards, hip-high weeds and large-scale auto tune-ups in driveways.

Sometimes, people just don’t follow the rules.

Maybe it’s because Aurora’s City Code is so long it reads like “War and Peace.” “It shall be the duty of every owner or occupant of any undeveloped lot or open area to keep the weeds on that portion of such undeveloped lot or open area property located within 200 feet of any developed area, dedicated street or existing thoroughfare cut to a height of not more than 12 inches,” reads a line in Section 142-73 of the code.

And you’d better have a ruler nearby because codes are also meticulous. Bushes can’t creep more than six inches onto the sidewalk. Hedges in the front yard can’t be higher than 42 inches. Prickly plants or plants with thorns can’t be planted within four feet of a public sidewalk.

Weeding through the rules can be daunting, which could be why so many residents get slapped on the wrist by the city for having overgrown shrubs, not shoveling their sidewalks or posting signs on light poles.

Then again, maybe some people just didn’t get around to taking that Common Sense 101 class.

Once, a code enforcement officer came across a heap of garbage in someone’s backyard so gargantuan that it could have become the state’s 54th fourteener. It took three days for contractors to trash  Trash Mountain, but not before finding a shiny relic of wishful cleanliness: a Good Housekeeping magazine.

Stowing garbage in someplace other than a designated trash bin is a common offense, code enforcement officers say.

“Sometimes we run into that stuff,” said Sandra Youngman, a code enforcement supervisor. “We don’t see it until we get into the backyard, and there you go. So we try to educate people.”

Teaching people that their own backyards or neighborhood alleys aren’t the best places to stow dirty diapers and expired milk cartons might seem like a tall task. But that’s only one of many lessons the city’s 18 code enforcement officers have to teach.

Youngman said sometimes property owners have their own ideas about how to fix a code violation. A property owner in north Aurora was told by officers a few years ago to cut down a massive tree in a vacant lot. The property owner hired a contractor that was not a licensed arborist with the city to cut the tree down, and he started cutting on the wrong side. “If it fell, it would have fallen across Colfax Avenue,” Youngman said.

Many Aurora homeowners call code enforcement officers to complain not about their human neighbors but about their animal ones.

Last year, Youngman responded to a complaint about an unwelcome alarm clock: early morning rooster noise in north Aurora. Officers went on a wild rooster-hunt at the crack of down and found the offending fowl in a tree.

Code officers also encounter Aurora homeowners who are, well, interesting — in an eccentric sort of way.

Moore said he once met a man in his mid-20s who refused to shovel the snow on his sidewalk because of an alleged back injury. The man said he was doing everything he could to fix his bad back, including smoking copious amounts of marijuana, but he was still ambivalent about shoveling the snow.

Pot calls in general are on the rise, Moore said. The number of code offenses related to marijuana odors have increased since medical pot became legal a few years ago. The trouble with the iconic smell, though, is that code enforcement officers sometimes can’t tell where it’s coming from.

The downturn in the economy has also caused an uptick in certain kinds of code violations, Moore said. Homeowners are now doing major repairs on cars in their driveways to earn extra money, which is forbidden under city code.

When code officers discover a violation, whether they’re tipped off to it or come across it themselves, they give the property owner a few days to correct the violation.

If the problem isn’t fixed by the deadline, the property owner gets a bill for whatever it costs the city to hire a contractor to fix the violation. If that bill still isn’t paid, the property owner receives a summons to appear in court.

In that respect, code enforcement officers are to property owners what meter maids are to car owners.

But most Aurora residents are grateful for the officers’ commitment to neighborhood upkeep.

“We’re enforcing laws, and anytime you’re enforcing code laws you’re telling somebody to do something on their property they may not want to do,” Moore said. “But the majority do appreciate it.”