For my tribute to Melody, click here.

Puns from the Standing Collection

Melody and I amused ourselves with puns practically from the day we met. There were some puns that we would pull out and re-use at long intervals; we called them the standing collection (alluding to how much we liked the permanent collection of the Georgia Museum of Art).

Three years ago today I posted the following on Facebook, preserving some of the puns I regularly lobbed at her:

Yesterday [Sept. 2, 2023] Melody washed my clothes. I thanked her by paraphrasing a movie title:

"It's a launderful wife."

When I do the laundry myself, I sing a parody I made up of a German folk song, "Mein Vater var ein Wäschermann"...

known in English as "The Happy Launderer."

And occasionally I allude to the fact that neither of us is good at dancing by singing, to her, a one-line Mozart parody, "Là ci darem i piedi"...

which roughly means, "There we will join our feet."

In fact, as best I recall, I uttered the last one again on Melody's last day, after the infectious disease specialist had come in and we somehow talked about dancing (which Melody would not be able to do even after a good recovery, because she couldn't do it before).

I should add that Melody introduced me to Mozart's beautiful aria "Là ci darem la mano" ("there we will give each other our hand (in marriage)") during my Yale days; she had discovered it when she took an undergraduate music appreciation class. It is a much more appealing love song if you don't know that the character who is singing it, Don Giovanni, is crashing the preparations for a wedding and is trying to make off with the bride!

Permanent link to this entry

How to be a good girlfriend

Some wisdom from Melody

When Melody was 12 or 13, her church (First Baptist, Tucker, Ga.) had a study session for the youth titled "How to be a good girlfriend or boyfriend." Her main take-aways were:

• You will spend most of your life with a spouse whom you have not met yet.
• All earlier relationships and experiences are preparation for that.
• Do not do anything that will make you less qualified for the happy marriage you hope one day to have, or less appealing to the right person when he or she comes along.
  
  That's a big one. You can't do wild things at 16 and expect them not to be part of your history and character when you are 20. They will limit what you can do and who will like you.
• Movies and songs are not a good guide; most are about things going wrong.

To these I would add one more, which I've shared with my granddaughters:

• Nobody will want to be your 20th or 30th serious boyfriend.

That is, don't pair up and break up repeatedly as a game. Instead, think of having friends, and a favorite, and eventually a relationship.

Permanent link to this entry

Making a UPS do its job

We've been having power failures, some short and some long, despite mild weather and no known car crash or anything; I don't know what happened. The UPS on my main desktop computer was a 600-VA model that was very inadequate; its log showed excessive current every time the computer started. So yesterday afternoon I got a much bigger 1500-VA UPS.

I learned along the way that a UPS is no longer called a UPS, at least at Best Buy. You have to ask for a "battery backup."

Anyhow, the purpose of the UPS is not to run the computer continuously through a long power failure. It's to bridge short power failures and to shut down the computer gracefully during a long one, then turn it back on when power comes back.

For that to work, two things have to happen.

(1) The computer has to be set to turn on as soon as power is applied, without waiting for someone to press the button. That is a BIOS configuration setting.

(2) The UPS has to be communicating with the computer (normally via USB nowadays, though it used to be done via serial port). I have APC UPSes and use PowerChute Serial Shutdown software (which is USB-based).

I found that the correct settings for PowerChute Serial Shutdown are:

What this means: When there's only enough battery charge left for 8 minutes (480 seconds), tell the operating system to shut down. Give it 4 minutes (240 seconds, probably much more than needed) to do that, and then shut down the UPS, turning off power to the computer. When power comes back, the UPS will turn on and the computer will boot.

You can (and should) verify all this by experimenting — unplug things and see what happens!

Permanent link to this entry

Some things everybody needs to know about estate law

I'm not a lawyer, and you should consult one for definitive answers to the issues I'm about to raise. But I do have some experience administering estates and am now administering Melody's, and I've been studying personal finance for a long time in connection with RIKI.

If you are an heir — that is, if you stand to inherit something — here are some big things you need to know.

• Someone must go to probate court and file the will or a declaration that there was none. This is not a step you can skip. You can't just gather around and say "Y'all know Mama wanted me to have this" and divide up the property. If nothing else, the names on house and car titles need to be legally changed.
• You should pay a lawyer for a brief consultation; I wouldn't try to do without it. If you are good at business, you'll find everything straightforward, but make sure you get good instructions about how to do things in your state. Don't fumble.
• Most joint bank accounts automatically go to the other person. Melody and I had nothing but joint bank accounts, so now they are all mine. Her will was not involved, nor were there any taxes.
• Life insurance pays immediately, to the beneficiary, and is not taxed. Immediately means within about six weeks, but definitely start the process promptly and don't wait for the will to be probated.
• Don't expect heavy taxes unless the estate is very large and you're in a state that taxes estates heavily (Georgia does not). The deceased person's final income tax return has to be filed, of course. In our case, Melody and I can file as Married Filing Jointly for 2026.
• You can't inherit debt. If Grandpa dies bankrupt, the heirs do not have to pay his bills, regardless of what the bill collectors say. However, they can't get any of his property until the bills have been satisfied; all his property has to be sold to pay as much of the debt as possible. The heirs may choose to pay bills in order for the estate to keep specific pieces of property.
• You can turn down an inheritance, in which case it goes back into the estate to be sold and divided up among the other heirs. If the inheritance is a vacation timeshare or something else with little value and high maintenance cost, turning it down can be a wise move.

Now if you are the person who is going to leave an inheritance, here are things you need to know:

• Do not have a joint bank account with anyone unless you want them to get the entire contents of it upon your death, regardless of what's in your will. Joint accounts are joint property.
• You need to make a will. It doesn't cost much, and you should make it with a lawyer's advice. You don't want anything to backfire.
• Don't store your will in your safe deposit box. The box can't be opened until after the will is probated.
• A "living will" is a different thing. A will says what happens to your property after you die. A living will says what medical treatment you want during your last days. You can make it by filling out a questionnaire provided by a hospital, with witnesses. Melody and I did, several years ago, and filed it with both hospitals.
• Please do not use your will to tie people down. Admit that when you die, your property will no longer be yours and will probably be sold. Don't try to tie someone to the family farm. (If you have someone who really wants it, leave it to him; that's different.) Courts have been known to overturn will provisions that substantially limit the freedom of the heir.
• Do not leave a part interest to a minor. This can easily backfire...
  
      I won't say where or when, but long ago, a brother and sister inherited undivided half-interests in a farm. Neither of them had ever lived on a farm, nor wanted to. The sister was a minor.
      The farm should have been sold immediately, because land prices were unusually high and the inheritors did not want it. But because the sister was a minor, it could not be sold. The brother, meanwhile, was denied a scholarship because of the property he "owned" but could not sell. All they could do was receive a small rental income from it and wait... and wait. Eventually they sold it, over the objections of relatives who wanted it kept in the family, but did not want to buy it. Everyone went away unhappy.
      It would have been better for the property to be placed in trust so that neither heir would own it until both were adults. Or for the will to authorize immediate sale.

So that's what I've learned from experience. Things are going very smoothly with Melody's estate, and the only substantial step is going to be re-titling the house to be solely in my name.

Permanent link to this entry

Sprucing up

To mark Melody's passing and the end of an era, I have changed the color scheme of the Daily Notebook, as I did when I retired from UGA. The new colors are designed to facilitate readability. Web pages as a whole are less colorful today than they were in the early days of the Web, except of course that full-color pictures will be as abundant as ever.

Permanent link to this entry