Pure Chaos

There are a lot of things I will miss about my current job in the golf business. In the heat of the moment, it's difficult to remember those things sometimes, and the bad parts outshine the good. The members at my club, by and large, have been great to me. They are very generous and typically very supportive of my family and I. They show genuine interest in me and my future, and I can honestly call quite a few of them my friends, ones I will stay in contact with well after my tenure here. And the job itself, well, it can be trying, but I'm really good at it. I've learned to be a great teacher of the game, but where I really shine is tournament management. Since coming to my current club, I've gone from being someone who had no idea how to run a tournament to someone who can singlehandedly set up, manage, and maintain a large-scale tournament from start to finish. While this is exciting in the moment, the stress that comes along with these tournaments is not worth it in the least. Right now, we are heading straight for the biggest tournament of the year, the Member-Guest Invitational. This is a tournament where 48 of our members each bring a guest for 4 days. We started prepping for this tournament months ago, but in the last week, the pressure has mounted on a daily basis, reaching a boiling point today.

I was at work from 7 until 5:30 today, and throughout that entire time, I was constantly in high gear. Tomorrow, we host the practice round, which is a tournament in and of itself. Up until today, we hadn't even started planning for this tournament, since we had the main tournament to attend to, a ladies' tournament today, and a couples event 2 days ago. At this time of the year, there are way too many tournaments to handle, and it feels like we are treading water. So, while one of my colleagues worked diligently on setting up the main tournament, I worked on setting up the practice round and getting it ready to go, while our boss tied up a bunch of loose ends around the event. Between the three of us, we were able to actually accomplish quite a bit, and we're sitting in pretty good shape coming into the event tomorrow, but it's just the beginning. The goal is to have everything set up before the event begins so we can focus on actually running the event on a daily basis while it's in progress instead of finishing it up while we go. There's still a lot to do to get to that point, but we are at least ready for tomorrow, which will leave us a lot more time to work on the main event. That said, I'm mentally and emotionally drained, and just holding on by a thread tonight.

Of course, I made time to work on my programming skills, as I have every day since May 26th of last year. There will be days that are harder than others to do this, and this is definitely one of them, but the next 4 days won't be much easier, so I'm bracing for impact. That being said, I worked on Andrew Mead's The Modern JavaScript Bootcamp on Udemy, which I think is the best JavaScript course I've taken so far, other than Will Sentance's courses. The challenges in this course are set up beautifully and are just challenging enough to really make you think and expand on what we are learning. In fact, I've covered the concepts we are covering in this course multiple times, but the challenges are growing my understanding in ways other courses haven't pushed me before. Like Andrew's other courses, you can tell how hard he's worked on perfecting this course, and I applaud what he's done here. I'm working on the section on JavaScript in the browser right now, and so far the concepts are pretty simple. But, instead of just glancing through these simple concepts, he's tying in concepts we've learned in past sections and making us expand upon them. For example, he taught in this section how to use methods like appendChild, querySelector, and remove, which are all really straightforward, but then he tied in the higher order function forEach to use on a nodelist with these methods, making it much more interesting. I'm not sure this is a course you would want to start off with in JavaScript, but it's perfect for my level, and I'm getting so much out of it.

Until tomorrow!