sister and stuff

[susandennis]

I think I may have dodged the sister bullet.  I did find out today that the amount in the letter was misleading.  The final amount will be less than 1/5th what my sister thought it would be.  She know nows for sure and has passed up a golden opportunity to cause trouble.  I won't rest easy until everything is final but I think I may be home free.

I'm really very lucky.  Starting back before Daddy died, my parents made detailed estate plans.  After he died Mom once even quizzed me on how I was going to handle my sister and the estate.  I passed the quiz.  But, the will and arrangements all backed me up so it wasn't difficult.  Plus, my sister was really only whiny and actually did not (at least not so far) cause any actual trouble.  I suspect my Mom quizzed her as well.  My brother, bless his soul, has thanked me repeatedly for my work on the estate and has been ever so grateful for anything he got. 

So we may nearly be done and I can put South Carolina behind me.  Whew.

And... no segway[sic]  I think I'm going to return my new cellphone and get a different one.  I'm not sure which one yet but I have a couple of weeks to decide.  This one is cute and little which is good but the screen is too little and it's just in the middle of feature land.  It's a costly phone that doesn't do anything really than it's cheaper cousins - at least not anything I want.  The features I want are on the more expensive phones.  So I'm either going to drop even further down the phone food chain or get stupid again and get more than I need.    I'm not sure which :)

Safeway should be here in a couple of hours with presto logs, Diet Dr. Pepper, kitty litter and bathtub drain supplies. 

And that's what I know so far today. 

Comments

[unzeugmatic.livejournal.com]

It sounds as if your mother had a good sense of who her children were (as individuals), which is no small feat for a parent. From your stories it seems that one of the things about your mother is that she was clear-eyed.

The whole inheritance thing is so weird. This is a small anecdote, but I recently learned the story of a relative who was upset when (not too long before he died), my grandfather gave something to one of his nephews. (Not something earth-shaking -- I think it was an expensive art book, something along the lines of an affordable and replaceable item.) The relative was upset because the relative is the one who had given my grandfather the book in the first place, and therefore thought it should be returned on my grandfather's death. Which isn't so much greedy (again, this relative could easily pick up another copy of the book) as weird.

So there's weird stuff about things (most of which I do understand by the way -- I am somebody who invests things with sentimental significance myself), and there's even weirder stuff about money. When my other grandfather died he didn't distribute his estate evenly among his three children -- two of them he (rightfully) felt were in much better financial shape than the third, so he did a 2:1:1 distribution. (We're not talking a fortune here, so the real effect is nearly symbolic). But he made darned sure that the two children getting a quarter of the estate (rather than a third) knew about this in advance, when he could talk about it with them, which was very wise on his part (neither of them felt he "owed" them money anyway). He didn't tell the third child in advance thinking that she would have been upset at what she might have taken as an implied criticism of her life. But after he was dead, what could she do to him about it? Clever, eh? And oh so complex.

[The money that came to my mother helped me a great deal, by the way: It arrived shortly before my year of unemployment in 1988, so there were some liquid assets around that my parents used to help me through that year. Go grandpa!]

I assume you are leaving your estate to Jake and Betty.