{"id":4637,"date":"2015-06-05T04:57:53","date_gmt":"2015-06-05T09:57:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/?p=4637"},"modified":"2015-06-05T05:17:00","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T10:17:00","slug":"needed-advice-on-appreciating-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/needed-advice-on-appreciating-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Needed: Advice on appreciating life"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think I need some advice on appreciating how great my life is.<\/p>\n

I haven’t been posting for two weeks, I realized today. First, I got sick\u00a0 and then when I got better, I was so far behind in working on our games that I just squashed bugs and held design meetings for days.<\/p>\n

Now, I’m 99% back to my usual self. Here is what has happened lately, in semi-chronological order.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Spoiled One was elected senior class president at the La-di-da College Preparatory School, where they also renewed her scholarship for a fourth year and she earned a perfect 4.0. Actually, I think it is higher than that because Honors and AP classes count for 5 points in GPA. She was also signed to a club soccer team. It’s not very usual to start playing club soccer at 17 but she’s not a very usual kid.<\/li>\n
  2. Darling Daughter Number 3 and Darling Daughter Number 1 co-authored a book<\/a> that appeared on the New York Times best-seller list this week.<\/li>\n
  3. In the past year, The Perfect Jennifer has gotten married, moved into a house and had her contract renewed to teach yet another year in downtown Los Angeles where she continues to be a blessing to her students (and lots of people consider her that besides me).<\/li>\n
  4. Darling Daughter Number 3 had three movie premieres, including one this week, for Entourage I just watched it tonight with The Spoiled One. It was good.<\/li>\n
  5. I spent all day on a set today for a commercial. Since there were big signs about not posting on social media, you will just have to wonder until it comes out.<\/li>\n
  6. We received another grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop games for rural schools serving English language learners.<\/li>\n
  7. Last month we had a successful Kickstarter campaign to develop another game, Forgotten Trail, to teach statistics.<\/li>\n
  8. Darling Daughter Number 1 had a healthy baby and moved into a house, with her husband and three lovely children, that is about half a mile away from us.<\/li>\n
  9. In August, I will be flying to Brazil to spend a week with all four of my daughters, while Darling Daughter Number 3 defends her world title.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \"The<\/a>
    The Perfect Jennifer Teaches Tree-Climbing<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    So, basically, everything good you could imagine happening to anyone has happened to me.<\/p>\n

    Instead of savoring how awesome my life is, most of my time I focus on how much more I want to do on these games, teaching statistics, teaching judo, writing conference papers, reports, journal articles. Not that all of those things aren’t useful and important, but it occurred to me today that I’m certainly not unhappy but I feel as if I should be tap-dancing happy and no tap-dancing has been happening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I think I need some advice on appreciating how great my life is. I haven’t been posting for two weeks, I realized today. First, I got sick\u00a0 and then when I got better, I was so far behind in working on our games that I just squashed bugs and held design meetings for days. Now,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-de-mars-general-life-ramblings"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4637"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4640,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4637\/revisions\/4640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejuliagroup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}