Our hectic start to 2008

Okay, so I'm sorry I haven't been able to post anything for a while. We have had a very busy last month and a half. On January 6th a member of our ward, Kristie Ragsdale, was shot to death in our church parking lot by her husband. I was conducting sacrament meeting (11am) at the time of the shooting, but you couldn't hear anything inside the building, thank goodness. We ended our services at around 11:15am) and the police helped us get everyone out of the building and to their homes. We spend many hours over the next week visiting with several members in their homes and calling more at home to check on them. I was happy to see how much our ward pulled together to become a tighter and closer ward family.

Then at the end of January, Caleb got very sick for a bout a week. Then Amy got it and was sick for a week. Then Caleb got something again and was sick for several days. Then on the 24th I started getting very congested and eventually had to get an antibiotic for a nasal infection. My head hurt so much I thought I had caveties in all of my upper teeth.

So then we spent 6 days on a trip to Disneyland, which Caleb loved. I will be posting pictures shortly. After we came back, I ended up getting swamped with work because rates had dropped a bit and I had a lot of questions about refinancing and purchasing homes. We had used our frequent flyer miles to buy airline tickets to visit Amy's brother Jimmy in at BYU Hawaii. So for the last 2 weeks, I have been going in to work around 6:30am to make sure I'm on top of several loans (4 or 5 of them have been very complicated and we've had to wade through a lot of issues). To put the icing on the cake, I was at work on Monday (Presidents Day - and a regular day off for me, but I went in to catch up on a few things) when my business partner called me and let me know that our one and only processor, Britnee, called him and apologized because her Dr. was making her check herself into a hospital with no contact with anyone for 1 month. She would not tell us a reason why, so we can only assume.

Well, last week was just pure craziness. Underwriting times that are usually at 2-3 days tops ballooned to 12 days and everyone was on edge. Not to mention I am now interviewing and hiring a new processor, but in the meantime having to process all our own loans ourselves. It has just been crazy! We did hire a new processor who has 8 years of experience who will start on Monday 2/25 so I will have 2 full days to help train her on our systems and get her up-to-speed on my files. So I'm hoping I won't be too stressed out while we're visiting Jimmy and Mikensi in Hawaii.