Taking Everything I've Got

Well, the Member-Guest tournament has begun, and I'm already completely wiped out. Today turned out to be a 12 hour day and I didn't end up getting home until 8 at night. While it was a difficult day, we survived it and did pretty well, with no real issues throughout the day. For a large part of the day, I was outside at one of the holes running one of the games for the event, where the players would bet on whether they could make a birdie, with odds being set. So, for about 4 hours, I baked in the 85 degree heat and actually got a bit of a sunburn at the beginning of March. It's crazy here in Florida how it can be in the 80s in March, but I guess that's Florida for you. Tomorrow starts the meat of the tournament, with us arriving at work at 6 AM and not leaving until around dark. After today, it's going to be a difficult one, but I keep thinking about the fact that I'm now down to only 3 days left. I don't have much energy left to write this blog entry, but I'm going to give it my all.

Given the hours of this last week, it's reminding me of all the reasons I want to get out of this career path and into software development. I've worked plenty of jobs where the hours are incredibly long, working 12 hour shifts, but I just don't have any interest in doing that anymore. With a nearly 2-year old at home, I'm missing out on all kinds of time with her and, given that we can only get daycare during the week, it's important for me to be able to have the weekends off. I don't want to look back in 10 years and realize I've completely missed her childhood; I want to be present for that and I want to have as much time as I can with her. My longer term goal is to be able to work from home so I can be with her as much as possible and set my own hours. Ideally, when she gets into school, I would love to be able to play golf some mornings, come home and get some work done, and then get some more work done later in the evening, but I know I can't completely set my own schedule, at least not for a while. Golf, too, is important to me, and helps keep me centered in a lot of ways, so I don't want to completely lose sight of that in the coming years. That's definitely a possibility, though, since I won't have access to a golf course anymore and most of my weekend days will be spent with the little girl. Still, I'm sure I can find a way to balance my schedule eventually.

As for my daily work, I was still able to get an hour's worth of time in before my focus started waning and my eyes wanted to close for the night. I wanted to have enough energy to write my daily blog entry, so I called it after an hour. Given I will be waking up at about 4:30 tomorrow morning, this is probably for the best. This will be the plan again for tomorrow and the next day as well, with Friday being the most challenging to fit in some time. I will be at a dinner for the Member-Guest until late and probably won't get home until around 9, so it's going to be a later night if I want to get in my time. I worked on Andrew Mead's The Modern JavaScript Bootcamp as I have for the past several nights, and it continues to impress me. I'm currently working on the section on writing JavaScript for the browser. We are exploring methods like addEventListener and querySelector, which I've definitely covered several times before, but I'm getting a better feel for them now than I have in the past. I'm pushing a little further with the challenges than Andrew is asking us to go, which helps me challenge myself a little bit, and I'm getting a lot more out of them than I did even in the GraphQL course. I'm excited to finish this section and see what the more difficult sections have in store, and I think I should definitely have a firmer grasp on JavaScript as a language after taking this course.

Until tomorrow!