Finger Cramps

Another hectic day is in the books during this crazy season down here in Florida, and it's getting old fast. It's good that I'm getting the hours and we definitely appreciate the money when it comes in, but I was hoping to be out of the business before it got too busy down here. Unfortunately, that's not the case, so I'm stuck working my butt off during the day and trying to cram in some studying at night while completely wiped of energy. We have had a couple of somewhat peaceful days for the last 2 days, with no big tournaments going on, but the tee sheet is jammed up from the time we open to late in the afternoon. The phone rings off the hook, and I feel like I'm getting pulled in 5 different directions constantly. I actually enjoy working in this kind of environment, as opposed to it being dead and not having anything to do, but I would prefer to be spending my days coding and learning the skills I have a true passion for. It's really difficult to get home and find the energy these days to devote myself to learning these really complicated skills after working these long days, but I'm trying my best. I always have it in the back of my mind that it's only a matter of time before I'll be able to do this as my profession. Life will surely feel a lot more fulfilling then.

After getting off work today, I rushed across town to pick up my daughter before the daycare closed at 6, and made it with about 4 minutes to spare. We've noticed in the last couple of days she's had a runny nose, but she hasn't been acting sick otherwise. She's eating well and has high energy levels, so I think she has just a slight cold. We received a call while I was at work that the daycare thought she had pink eye and she wasn't feeling good. Like I said, we knew she wasn't feeling that great, but we didn't think she had pink eye. When I picked her up, I checked her out and she didn't seem to have pink eye, but she still had a runny nose. I got her home, got her a big dinner, and then got her straight to bed. By the time I had eaten and gotten settled in, it was already 8, but I knew I had to get some work done. I was ready to go straight to bed myself, but I needed to at least put in some time today. I wouldn't be happy with myself if I didn't. I wish I had the energy to stay up until midnight and work on this stuff, but that's just not an option right now, especially since I have to be back at work at 7 tomorrow.

So, I got right back to work on Maximilian Schwarzmüller's React Native - The Practical Guide on Udemy. This course, like I've said many times before, is ridiculously difficult. What's worse is that Max acts as though it's just a walk in the park as he's typing at 100 words per minute and cranking out code like a machine. We finished up yesterday on a really cool recipes app, and went over the workflow for using Redux in a React Native app, which was just as difficult as I figured it would be. React Native is difficult to learn on its own, but when you throw Redux into the equation, you can just forget it. I got through the section though, and learned a thing or two in the process. We then moved on to a brand new app, which I started today. This app will be a fake e-commerce site with just a few items in the store to purchase. We will be using everything we've learned from React-Navigation and Redux, and adding in some new concepts as well, but I'm not sure which yet. Today was mainly about setting up the foundations of the app. In most courses, the amount of code that we wrote would take 3 or 4 hours of course content, but I'm pretty sure we did it in less than an hour in this course. We were flying. We have set up all of the different screens for the app, the navigation configuration for the stack implementation, the reducer for the products, and also all of the other folders and the setup for our app. In all, we initiated about 15 to 20 files and about 10 to 15 folders. It was ridiculous, but at least we got a lot of the groundwork out of the way and can now start focusing on the bigger concepts of the app.