I mentioned a while back that I was going to try something different to stay in touch with friends, now that I have cut the Facebook cord.  This feature, called Note from Self,  is one idea toward that end.  I intend this to be a month-end catching-up on a more personal and newsy level, without so much of the “grinding self-commentary” that my favorite college professor David Walton decried.  Less Thoughts at Large, more Strictly Personal, to put it in Sidney J. Harris terms.

So here goes.  May has been a month of blossoms and raindrops.  Our Catawba (purple) rhododendrons are spent and their new shoots are sprouting.  The mountain laurels that have managed to survive on our windswept lot are in profuse bloom.   The multitude of peonies that Sue adores have been beaten down by our rains, and it has been a race to cut them and enjoy them before their blossom-heads explode or fall to the ground under their own weight.  We had almost five inches of rain from May 13-19, another half-inch May 20-26, and almost an inch in the last two days (and raining again).  At least I have not had to water anything.

The wet weather has given me the excuse to avoid yard work and focus on the paper I plan to submit to the MDPI Games Journal.  I’ve worked a long time on this project, which deals with optimum bidding strategies in the Showcase Round of The Price is Right show. (I discussed this in a previous post.)  I hope to finish the paper by mid-July.  This will be my first submission to a journal since the days of the now-defunct Journal of Recreational Mathematics.

I also spent some hours this month doing art for a music CD that my singer-songwriter friend Bruce Irving created.  It is his fourth, speaking of dedicated efforts.

We just lost our 13-year-old side-by-side refrigerator that we had named “Steve & Eydie” in honor of the famous rendition of “Side by Side” by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.  (OK, we really didn’t name our fridge, I just made that up.  Some things haven’t changed here at the blog.)  But our fridge really did conk out, and right on time, based on their average 13-year life expectancy.  We learned a few things from the experience.  One is to estimate the value of the contents of your fridge when it fails.  Knowing this could save you many dollars worth of ice and dry ice.  Dry ice is not cheap and it lasts 40 hours max in a regular cooler.  Figure $10 a day to keep your frozen food frozen.

It took seven days for us to get our new fridge delivered, and then another 12 hours for it to cool down after it was installed.  It is possible we had $75 worth of food in the freezer — but not much more.  That said, it has been a long time since I had a chance to play with dry ice.  So from lemons, lemonade (or whatever this fiendish concoction is).

We have had various medical and dental appointments along with the regular ones for my left eye.  We took the opportunity before one appointment to have a wonderful anniversary dinner at Bentley’s on 27 in downtown Charlotte.  The view was impressive, the service was great, the food was excellent, but the company — my wife — is what made the evening special, more than the accoutrements.

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This was my first attempt to be newsy and I’m not sure how it went.  It’s like Jon Stewart has given way to Trevor Noah here.   We’ll try this again next month and decide.