A Hectic End to a Hectic Day

We don't live in a huge city; in fact, Sarasota, FL is similar in size to most college towns. Much like college towns, we become inundated with traffic during certain times of the year, such as right now. In Florida, the nicest months of the year are from December until April. People come from all over the world to live for a few months or take a vacation and, with Sarasota boasting one of the best beaches in America, Siesta Key Beach, we are more popular than other cities up and down the coast. It's a beautiful city with a growing amount of culture, making it a very attractive destination. Most of our traffic this time of the year comes from what we call "Snow Birds," or people who come down to their second homes from the northeast, midwest, and Canada, mostly. They live here for those perfect 5 months of the year, and then go back up north during the tepid summer months down here, getting the best of both worlds. Since we are a smaller town, our road system really isn't built for this kind of traffic inundation, and our roads become clogged for these busy times of the month. Today was the worst I've seen it yet, and it was mostly due to the Vice President coming for a fundraiser near where I work. I found out from a member who had just come across town before I left how bad traffic was, so I got a head start and actually left work 10 minutes early so I could make it to the daycare before they closed. What is usually a 25 minute drive became a 50 minute drive, making me late to pick up my little girl anyways.

Before I left work, I was slammed all day. Since this is the perfect time to be outside in Florida, everyone is down with their guests to play some golf. In the Summer, we may do 60 to 70 rounds in a day on our busier days, with some days not even cracking 50 rounds. Today, we did about 130 rounds, which has become a normal occurrence for the last 2 months. When I first got to my club, we would do that many rounds every once in a while, but it wasn't constant. Since I've been there, we have started selling out our tournaments and booking up the entire day from our first time until our last. I don't know how much that has to do with me and how much it has to do with the improvement of our facilities, but I would like to think I played a part in increasing revenues for the club. For the last 3 years, I've given a full effort every day to my work. I take my job seriously, whatever it may be, and strive for excellence. While I'm leaving this world of golf and this country club behind, I'll be able to look back on this time with pride and know that I was part of something awesome. Someday, if we end up staying in this area, which is unlikely, I would love to be able to join this club. But, like I said, the likelihood of us staying in Sarasota is slim, and we will likely be moving elsewhere in the future. Regardless, this club will always hold a special place in my heart, and I hope I can come back and visit it from time to time in the future.

After this hectic day and the crazy traffic, I picked up my little girl from daycare, grabbed some food on the way home, fed the little girl, and quickly got her down for bed. By the time I was able to get down to work, it was already 8 PM, and with another day just like today in the works tomorrow, I know I'll need a good night's rest. But, of course, I was able to at least get a solid hour's worth or work done before cranking out this blog entry. I'm still working on Andrew Mead's The Modern GraphQL Bootcamp on Udemy, with about 4 hours or less left in the course. I'm working on a testing section right now, and for me, it's kind of grueling. I'm just really uninterested in testing, and it bores the crap out of me, but I understand the importance of it, and I'm trying to give it my all. We are setting up Apollo on the client side right now to facilitate the testing with Jest, which is a little more interesting, but it's still just difficult to get through. It's not like learning Gatsby for the first time or discovering GraphQL for the first time, but I'm getting through it. I'm only about halfway through this section, but I'm hoping I can finish it off either tomorrow or the next day. After this section, there's only about a half-hour left of material to go, discussing the creation of a boilerplate project for GraphQL, and then I can turn my focus to JavaScript. Overall, I've loved this course and can't wait to learn more and more about GraphQL. I could definitely see myself working with GraphQL in a job setting, but it won't be happening for a while. Hopefully, it keeps growing in popularity in the meantime.

Until tomorrow!