Wednesday, March 18, 2009

My Name!

14 years later, and it's finally for real. After starting to call myself Sky at age 10 in fifth grade (where there were 7 girls in my class and 3 of us were named Sarah), I have at last legally changed my name to Sky. I had been planning to do it all through college, but I never wanted to part with the $300 or so it cost to do it in court. But now that I have been graduated for over a year now, and have a full time job (yay!), I figured I was able to do it now. It took 3 months from the time I filed the paperwork to the day I had my court appearance.

So, in December, I got the packet of papers to fill out and the directions on what else I had to do. It cost one hundred bucks to file the papers.

Then, I got my court date and judge assigned to my case.

After that, I had to go to our newspaper and a legal bar journal to take out articles stating when my hearing was in case anyone wanted to contest it. That was the other $200.

Next, I went to the state police to get my fingerprints taken. The don't use ink anymore! It was all futuristic-y and stuff.

Then I went back to the courthouse with proofs of the articles and my fingerprint card and filed those. They sent my prints off to the FBI to see if I was an evil person or not.

That whole process took about a month, so then I waited around for 2 months until my court date.

I was scheduled for 9 am, but the sentencings that my judge was handling at 8:45 ran over, so I got to watch people get sentenced for drug possession and related crimes. A little bit surreal.

Then the judge called me up and I had to take this oath that was a bit more wordy than the usual "so help you God" one. It was pretty cool though, because God was in it a lot.

So I got to say "I do" and then "yes, your honor" while he asked me questions. He basically looked through my folder and said, it seems like you haven't done anything wrong and you know what you're doing with yourself in life. That's good, so I'm going to grant your petition.

That was very happy news indeed, and I said 'Thank you very much, your honor,' and then I had to go file the court order with the Prothonotary. The judge wrote it in green ink, so the copies came out very light, but that's okay because next...

I went to the driver's license center and they accepted it and I now have my new driver's license and it says Sky on it! I have been showing it to everyone. Very awesome.

I also applied for a new social security card, which should arrive soon, and I have a new bank account at a new bank with my new name, and it's all very exciting.

I like when events happen in life. :-)

5 comments:

Moll moll said...

Yay! That's incredibly exciting :-)

Unknown said...

WOW - I had no idea there was so much involved in the process. What a cool birthday present ;-) Love ya, Kelly

Deg said...

Congrats, Sky!

Unknown said...

I love how excited you are when you were finally able to legally change your name. Considering that it took a while for everything to be processed, I have to applaud your patience. It’s good that you decided to get your legal identification changed right away when the name change was approved. Has it been fun finally being legally known as Sky?

-- Kimora Avery

Sky said...

It has been awesome!