Lawyers and Stuff

I finally admitted to the encroachment of Time upon my mortality, and so I went to a lawyer and began the process of getting a will made. Actually, he's going to make three documents. There will be the Will, and there will be a Medical Directive, and there will be a Power of Attorney. Talk to your favorite lawyer for more information. The bundle will cost me $475.

And I went to my banks (I have two, due to historical reasons) and made my accounts POD to my partner, Nuria. One bank, Bank of America, allowed me to specify a beneficiary by going online. It was easy and fast. My other bank, Truist (formerly Suntrust and BB&T) required me to appear in person at the bank in order to specify a beneficiary. It was a time-wasting but straightforward process. The banker at Truist took care of puting the POD on everything except an IRA, which he said was going to be complicated and would take some time. Whereupon I said that's okay, I don't need the IRA to be POD, there's not much remaining in it anymore. 

It's morning and Nuria is off to her morning exercise class at the Senior Center. I'm well past the exercise stage of life. I just want to be able to make it from my bed to the kitchen to my PC and eventually back to my bed. And that's just the first hour of my day.

Nuria is planning a sight-seeing trip to Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay. "Good idea," I told her. "See it before it's gone beneath the waves. Because oceans are rising and Tangier Island will disappear one day." Tangier Island isn't something I want to see. Neither is a boat ride across the Chesapeake Bay. Been there, done that, blogged about it. It was a trip I was fortunate to survive—and survival was very questionable for a few hours of that trip. You can read about it here.

Speaking of Truist Bank, I just received a call from a woman who works there. I left a message on her phone yesterday morning, asking her to call me, but I anticipated that she wouldn't call back the same day, because ... you know ... Truist. So I drove to the bank and took care of business. But it's nice that someone at Truist will return your call, eventually. Of course, I'm only revealing my own expectations and experiences. Your experience may be better—or worse. Truist has a pretty good website, but sometimes I experience glitches. The other day I was trying to do something and I kept ending up at a page that said, "You're almost finished!" But there was nothing more I could do on that page. There were no links to click on. It was a dead end. I figured I messed up somewhere, and I started over, but I ended up at the same page, telling me I was almost finished. After three or four tries, I gave up. I don't hold it against them. I've been a website designer, and sometimes you need to make one (possibly simple) change that (to implement the change) requires multiple changes to multiple pages, and you overlook something and then ... you have a broken link, a branch to nowhere, a page that's a dead end. It happens. It never happened with my websites, of course, but then, I'm a perfectionist. It can be a curse.

I have to go. Nuria just entered the room. 

"How was your class?" I ask.

"Very ... very ... how can I say ... very ... hard," she replied. And she told me that her trip to Tangier Island is off, because the trip is fully booked now. But there's a trip to Williamsburg that is still possible. I've been to Colonial Williamsburg at Christmas, and the Christmas lights and the brightly-lit shops and the many shoppers made it an amazing memory. Okay, it's a nice memory, not "amazing." But there's nothing wrong with a nice memory, is there?