One Down, Three to Go

I think Ross and I have officially discovered the most stressful 2 weeks of our lives so far. We thought planning our wedding, buying our first house, or evening moving to a different state was stressful. Those events don't even compare to last week and this week. We both knew that finals this year was going to be more intense than last year, but not this intense. And then throw in two audits for me at work and you have the perfect storm.

Last week Ross had his first of four finals. Usually his finals were split up pretty evenly between the two weeks. But this year had to be different. One final was one week and the other three are the next. And to make things even better, two are back-to-back. Which makes studying for them even more difficult. Last week for me was filled with my first audit. To keep the details at a minimum, the audit was to review our Technical Files of all the products that are manufactured. Each product is put into a Family and each Family has a Technical File. So, one of 30 files was selected to be audited. Well, what made this audit more stressful was that these files hadn't been reviewed and updated for quite a few years. Which meant I was the lucky one who got to spend a lot more time at the office making sure they were as current as possible and ready to be torn apart by an auditor. So you can imagine the extra stress I brought to the table. But after seven and a half hours of overtime in just three days, we passed the audit with no issues! Too bad I didn't have much time to relax and enjoy the feeling of passing because we had one day to get ready for another audit. Thankfully I wasn't too involved in the second audit but I still had plenty of work to get done that would be reviewed. And good news is that we passed that one as well!

So now the focus goes back to Ross and finals. The last few days have been filled with reading, outlining, going through flash cards, and just flat out talking through the outline to make sure all points are covered and memorized. There have been some late nights but he feels pretty good about the one today. Which means tonight is going to be another long night of flash cards and talking through the outline to get ready for the final tomorrow. The last final of the year is on Friday. And after that we are planning on movie marathon weekend and nothing but relaxing. We are also planning an evening in Disneyland since the last time we were there was when Mom, Dad, Shaun, and Amanda were here back in October. I think it's time we visited the Magic Kingdom again.

Once finals are done I think it will be easier to get into the holiday spirit. Although the weather out here has not been very helpful. This past weekend the temperatures were in the mid to upper 80s! That's right 80s. Thankfully they are are slowing starting to get back into the low 70s and upper 60s (which is cold for people out here). I guess you take what you can get.