Can you believe that as May crept in we still had cool temps? Usually I’ve unloaded my closet of all winter wear by Mother’s Day. But, despite tons of rain, we reached temps in the 90’s by Memorial Day.

I started the month battling a ruptured cyst on my back which I had to have drained the last Monday in April. Yep, it was gross! But by the first Saturday of the new month I was well on my way to recovery and my back was not as sore. I’m glad because I began a week of vacation on May 5th.

And on the 5th, I bought mosquito fish and plants for our small garden pond, always a sign that spring has finally sprung even though summer rolls around at the end of the month ushered in by Memorial Day. Such is St. Louis.

For my week of vacation, I spent half the week at home working on my novel, and the other half in Dyersburg visiting family. I had not been back to Tennessee since Christmas. It rained every day while I was there, but it was a nice visit spent at Mom’s house. We visited cemeteries to locate distant grandparents I’d recently discovered on ancestry.com which was interesting. They were close by and we never knew who they were until now!

I always hate the long drive to Tennessee and back but spent it listening to two audio books which helped. Chris Kattan’s Baby Don’t Hurt Me came out this month and he reads the audio book. What a great book! If you like bios, comedy, or SNL, definitely check this one out.

I also listened to Tyler Henry’s Between Two Worlds  read by the author. I’m a fan of his show so I enjoyed this book. It offered up a lot of validation for me about my own personal feelings on religion and spirituality.

Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs) had a new book come out this month after a long hiatus. It’s called Cari Mora. I’m not even going to go into it. I’ve been reading it for two weeks and I’m so bored. What a snore! Hard to believe the author who created the infamous Hannibal Lecter wrote this drivel. I’m going to finish it though.

I picked up Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot while I was waiting for my copy of Harris’s book to arrive. I’d never read this one and I can always rely on King to get me through a reading drought.  And I started another audio book which is decent. It’s called Stillhouse Lake. So…umm..yeah..I was “reading” 3 books all at the same time again, 4 if you included the collection of Tennessee Williams poems which I finished on the last day of the month.  Some drought, huh?

Speaking of poetry, I didn’t write any this month. That’s probably because of the time spent gardening and writing. That’s okay. At least I was doing things I love. Did I mention I started writing ANOTHER book? Yep, I needed to step away from the current work in progress for a bit just to collect my thoughts, but I wanted to keep writing.

I’d been toying with this other idea and set of characters, so while I was on vacation I spent some time getting some ideas down. I only wrote about 5,000 words and I’m cool with that. It will give me something to work on after I finish the current work in progress.

In the garden, this was the month of the iris, my favorite flower. We had lots of blooms which was nice since we had dug up every iris we had and divided and transplanted them all last fall. Our efforts paid off! We also have the new bed in the front yard which we’re tending to and adding to a lot. We had some baby robins reared in a nest on our fence row, and some baby rabbits in the yard too which is fun to observe every year.

Lastly, I started a part time job as an Instacart shopper and delivery person. I’ve always been interested in these gig-type jobs like Uber, where you work via an app on your cell phone and set your own hours. Instacart is kind of hard – that’s because I think there are a lot of people doing it in the area but not a lot of customers are using it, which means there’s not a lot of work to go around. It’s hard to get hours at first, but once I got the hang of it I was able to work 4 hours one Saturday. I only got to do 3 shops but made close to $50. I didn’t get any hours the following weekend, but picked up two hours on Memorial Day and made another $40. More about this in another blog post.

But…that was May. Flip that calendar to June now. It’s almost summer. See you then.