I Say It Best When I Say Nothing At All.....

I am currently reading Hostage , a novel by Robert Crais. As I was reading last night, I realized that my job has some similarities to a hostage negotiator. Although I never have to diffuse a situation to get the hostages and the perpetrators out of an intense situation, I sometimes feel like resolving issues on mortgage files is a lot the same, and the stress could not be any greater than what I deal with, albeit lives are not at stake in my case. Yesterday, one of my loan officer's transferred his borrower's phone call to me. The borrower threatened to walk away from the closing (pull the trigger) unless I was willing to give him what he wanted. He claimed he was being charged $750 more in closing costs than what I told him he would have. He proceeded to tell me that I had lied to him and I had to be charging a lot in junk fees. In reality, he was not overcharged, and his closing costs were very much in line with what he agreed to pay. The $750 overage he was seeing was comin...

Coralee didn't have to play the organ today. Bonus! I actually got to sit next to her during Sacrament Meeting. This is a very rare occasion. If this wasn't a bonus enough, I had a second person available to help me keep the kids properly behaved. We have too many children now to completely separate them. It used to be that one child could sit at one end of the pew, then a parent, then a child, then a parent, then a child. Matthew is still being held by one of us, but that still leaves a couple of children who are lucky enough to sit together. In today's arrangement, Nathan and Jeffrey were the lucky ones. The meeting, for the most part, went pretty well today. The more challenging child, Matthew, decided it was time to be fed early in the meeting. This required Coralee to be excused, and there I sat with the other four children. I could see their minds working in sync almost immediately after Coralee left the chapel. Jeff and Nate started poking each other on queue, "...

We took the kids swimming on Labor Day at a local indoor, community pool. We all had a great time. The pool is really nice. They have a lazy river, a large circular slide and several different structures that shoot water in all kinds of directions. There is something for everybody there, and when it was time, it was a real challenge to get the kids out of the water so we could head home. I love how water makes people have very little body weight. I was able to carry three children down the lazy river with very little effort. I had one on my back, and the other two were stretched out in a 'Superman' flying position, holding on to my arms that were perpendicular to my body. The kids thought I was the strongest man in the world, and I was nearly convinced that I was. A couple of hours after swimming, hot water leaked out of my ear. All of a sudden, I was hearing better. I didn't even know I was hearing badly. It was just an added bonus to my day. I was thinking, "Gee, I...