Signing Day

It was warm in the office.  Unlike last time, the blinds were drawn and the water was room temperature, not ice cold.  M apologized that their air conditioning was not working.

The first thing she did was to bring a box of pens to the table and invite us to each take one.

I wasn't sure why.  Were these going to be thank you gifts for having spent nearly $3,000 on her services?

But no.  These would be the pens we would  use to sign various places to finalize the creation of The Sykes Family Trust.  I chose the red-ish pen, Walt took the blue and we got down to business.

There was nothing we hadn't seen in some form before.  We started with the medical directives, which we had brought with us.  We went over, again, all the various parts of it (I was pleased to note that Ned, who would be our first medical agent, after Walt (or me) would not have the power to commit me to a mental instituion.  Whew.  I will sleep comfortably tonight!).  We signed in several places.  I goofed, she took the page out and ran another copy.  I signed right the next time.

It went on like that for 2-1/2 hours, reading pages, making adjustments, signing, sometimes having to have the pages recopied or new information typed into new pages.

Walt went through everything thoroughly.  M answered all of his questions to his satisfaction.  We added things that we hadn't originally planned to add, we made a couple of adjustments.

We signed page after page, line after line.  I haven't signed so much paperwork since we bought our house in 1973!

I don't know what happens to people who have complicated estates.   As I said before, we really don't have much to worry about.  There will be no fights over anything but Delicate Pooh (I considered putting "shared custody" in print, but decided that would be just silly).

When we finally had a complete, error-free, typo-free copy printed all official on heavy weight cream-colored paper, it was time to sign the final document.   We took our fancy pens and signed our names for the last time.

When we had our first meeting with M, we went out to lunch to celebrate, but today Walt had to get the car we'd rented for our trip to Santa Barbara back to the dealership, so no time for lunch.  At least I felt we could drive over the freeway back to Davis with a clear conscience.  If that semi truck tipped over on top of us today, the kids were covered and we had just made their lives after our deaths much less complicated.

Next thing is to start planning for our trip next week.  I'm discombobulated since we were in Santa Barbara.  Today seems like it should be Monday instead of Friday, but no, really DO leave for Prague in four days.  I need to spend some time getting the house ready for Ashley, who will move in with her dogs.  At least now she has a working shower, thanks to the repair work done by our fix-it guy.

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In my email tonight, I got the following letter.  I get almost NO personal mail any more, so I even read this even though I knew it was a scam.   But I loved it:

Hello, I am Ashleigh. I came upon ur photo by chance, and I have to admit that you look pretty. You seem to be a man who is interesting to spend time with, you know, you really attract me :) It's funny cause it's never happened to me before :) Maybe we're a perfect match? :)

It's nice to know that somebody thinks I am a pretty man.