{"id":17618,"date":"2018-05-29T11:50:22","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T15:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=17618"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:42:54","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:42:54","slug":"note-from-self-2018-05","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2018\/05\/note-from-self-2018-05\/","title":{"rendered":"Note from Self: 2018-05"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 This feature, called Note from Self<\/em>,\u00a0 is one idea toward that end.\u00a0 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<\/a> decried.\u00a0 Less Thoughts at Large, more Strictly Personal, to put it in Sidney J. Harris<\/a> terms.<\/p>\n

So here goes.\u00a0 May has been a month of blossoms and raindrops.\u00a0 Our Catawba (purple) rhododendrons are spent and their new shoots are sprouting.\u00a0 The mountain laurels that have managed to survive on our windswept lot are in profuse bloom.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 At least I have not had to water anything.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> Journal.\u00a0 I’ve worked a long time on this project, which deals with optimum bidding strategies in the Showcase Round of The Price is Right<\/em> show.\"\"<\/a> (I discussed this in a previous post<\/a>.)\u00a0 I hope to finish the paper by mid-July.\u00a0 This will be my first submission to a journal since the days of the now-defunct Journal of Recreational Mathematics<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0also spent some hours this month doing art for a music CD<\/a> that my singer-songwriter friend Bruce Irving created.\u00a0 It is his fourth, speaking of dedicated efforts.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.\u00a0 (OK, we really didn’t name our fridge, I just made that up.\u00a0 Some things haven’t changed here at the blog.)\u00a0 But our fridge really did conk out, and right on time, based on their average 13-year life expectancy.\u00a0 We learned a few things from the experience.\u00a0 One is to estimate the value of the contents of your fridge when it fails.\u00a0 Knowing this could save you many dollars worth of ice and dry ice.\u00a0 Dry ice is not cheap and it lasts 40 hours max in a regular cooler.\u00a0 Figure $10 a day to keep your frozen food frozen.<\/p>\n

It took seven days for us to get our new fridge \"\"<\/a>delivered, and then another 12 hours for it to cool down after it was installed.\u00a0 It is possible we had $75 worth of food in the freezer — but not much more.\u00a0 That said, it has been a long time since I had a chance to play with dry ice.\u00a0 So from lemons, lemonade (or whatever this fiendish concoction<\/a> is).<\/p>\n

We have had various medical and dental appointments along with the regular ones for my left eye.\u00a0 We took the opportunity before one appointment to have a wonderful anniversary dinner at Bentley’s on 27<\/a> in downtown Charlotte.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022\u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n

This was my first attempt to be newsy and I’m not sure how it went.\u00a0 It’s like Jon Stewart has given way to Trevor Noah here.\u00a0\u00a0 We’ll try this again next month and decide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 This feature, called Note from Self,\u00a0 is one idea toward that end.\u00a0 I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes-from-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17618"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17673,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17618\/revisions\/17673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}