Day 20: Where did the time go???

This has been one of those days where time just got away from me. It all started this morning when I took my morning walk, and mysteriously my usual 30-minute walk took 37 minutes. Then, inexplicably, my usual shower routine took 15 minutes longer than usual. I managed to get to class on time, but I was worn out before the day had even begun.

Our class day whizzed by as we all frantically tried to complete our Friday projects. Our assignment this time was to create a website for a small Alaskan town to provide information on the town, create a registration page for the one hotel, and create a page to rent a car at the one car rental place. I chose to use a lifeline and texted our friend Roy, whom I knew once visited Alaska and who might have some pictures I could use for the site. He couldn’t find them in time, but suggested I just google the town he stayed at for pictures. In the category of there are no coincidences, both he and our instructor had visited the SAME small Alaskan town!

The JavaScript coding was an ugly business. The hotel registration site was horrendous. There was a lot of crazy logic for discounts, free breakfasts for seniors, drop-downs, radio buttons, checkboxes, and validations for number of people to a room, etc. For the life of me, I just could NOT figure out how to give seniors their breakfast for free! The fact that many of my best friends and my spouse fall into this category is especially ironic. The great thing was that our instructor showed me how to use the debugger—I discovered that my code was finding the first match for breakfast, and just dropping out of the function with that value. She explained I needed to put the most restrictive option first. Oddly, this STILL didn’t work. I FINALLY got what I wanted by saying if you checked off “breakfast” and you WEREN’T a senior, then calculate the charge for you and your little tots. Else, the meal was free.

I didn’t get to the “tours” page, but I do remember our instructor saying that they’d rather have the required pages set, rather than a half-assed job on those and the the extra-credit one. I may spend Saturday adding some more illustrations to the pages I did complete before the 5 pm deadline.

By the end of my Friday, I was in a coma. To give you an idea about the level of my exhaustion, I drove home, turned off the engine, and almost fell asleep in the car in the garage.

Day 19: the ups and downs

In contrast to the utterly CRAZY day that was my yesterday, today was much better. We had labs to do, but the calculations were similar to yesterday’s scripts, so it was much easier. Either that, or I’m getting better at hooking up JavaScript to web pages.

I think talking a walk this morning when I got up, rather than trying to squash steps in during our lunch break gave me back some of my sanity. Okay…I’ll admit, the pizza lunch, courtesy of our instructor, didn’t hurt, either! Someone also mysteriously sprung for Dunkin’ Donuts munchkins…there should be some sort of quality award for whoever this person is.

I may be singing another tune tomorrow when we’re cramming in our Friday project. I’m trying to get a jump on it tonight by setting up my Bootstrap settings, css, and JavaScript flies ahead of time. I really hope our instructor wasn’t kidding about it being a travel site project, because I just downloaded a boatload of travel pictures, including our Washington, D.C. trip. I can’t take credit for the picture below. Our friend Larry doctored this one up!

Day 18: My life on the “outside”…

…or, WHAT LIFE? Note: whining ahead.

After yet another day of staying very late, trying to figure out code (and desperately trying to remember what I learned last week, that I’m evidentially supposed to be incorporating into the exercise du jour), I’ve come to the conclusion that I really can’t make plans after class during the week. I have a whole plethora of activities that I usually do after work that are just not going to be possible anymore—at least not until I finish training.

So far, this week, I’ve had to blow off my Tuesday night knitting group (sacrilege!) and another activity I do on Wednesday afternoons. We have some friends visiting tomorrow night, whom I’m probably going to wave “hello” to on my way into my home study to do more work (my classwork portfolio is a tad out of date). Oh, and we’re having SEVERAL people to the house this weekend—something we’d planned long before I knew I was going to be spending my summer snorkeling through CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and Bootstrap. Ask me if I’ve done ANYTHING to prepare for this…so far, my poor, long-suffering spouse is having the shoulder the burden for this.

Don’t even ask me about my exercise schedule…okay, you may ask. This was the extent of my exercising for today. At lunch, I enough time to walk outside and take a picture of this bird…that’s it.