May is upon us, but spring seems to be dragging its heels. It feels like it’s getting colder instead of warmer… – I wrote that earlier in May when I drafted this post, but at least by the end we’d had some really warm and sunny days!
What I have read
I finally finished two books that had been on my reading pile for months, so that was a relief.
What I have read:
- The Sinister Booksellers of Bath (Left-Handed Booksellers of London #2) – Garth Nix
- All Creatures Great and Small – James Herriot
- A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
- Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
- Hidden Figures – Margot Shetterly Lee
- The Echo of Old Books – Barbara Davis
- Boy – Roald Dahl
- A Leap of Faith for the Cornish Midwife (Cornish Midwife #5)
- The Reading List – Sara Nisha Adams
- The Dragon in the Library (Dragon in the Library #1)
And I’m still working on:
- Going Solo – Roald Dahl
- Tilly and the Lost Fairytales (Pages & Co #2) – Anna James
- What Was Hidden at Ardhmor (Ardhmor #3) – Lea Booth
What I have watched
- We’ve watched the odd episode of Richard Osman’s House of Games, but mostly we’ve been watching Lego Masters Australia as Ewan got into that at the end of season 3. We’ve then started the American version which isn’t as good, and have watched Taskmaster each week too.
- As the Harry Potter movies are on netflix I’ve watched the second through to the sixth, having watched the first a few months ago on DVD.
- I also watched all three Night at the Museum movies, having only seen the first before, and the fantastically creepy Return to Oz.
- My sister and I watched Anastasia, the non-Disney movie which is now on Disney+, as well as two episodes of Motel Makeover and were baffled by the choices made by the two businesswomen in charge of the renovations.
- Having read Treasure Island I watched the 1950 Disney movie – I thought it fascinating how R L Stevenson’s pirates so heavily influenced pirates in fiction ever since, and then Robert Newton’s portrayal of Long John Silver then massively influenced how pirates talked on screen post 1950.
- We introduced Brodie to Star Wars with Episode IV, and he loved it.
- Stef and I watched The Princess and the Frog as she’d never seen it before.
What I have done
- Having finally found all the pieces I built the Lego pirate ship (Black Seas Barracuda (US) / The Dark Shark (UK) – 6285) that belongs to the same theme as the fortress and the pirate island I have built in the past few months. This one was a big build – over 900 pieces so it took a few evenings, then a delay as I waited for a couple of replacement parts to arrive. It’s still missing a couple of little pieces but nothing too important!
- We had a couple of visits to different beaches, collecting some pottery and glass (me) stones and shells (Brodie).
- Brodie had his sports day and we were very relieved that there weren’t any parents’ races!
- We visited the Botanic Gardens on an event day and learned about bees, and spotted the stick insects in the greenhouses for the first time ever.
- We upgraded to a newer car – this one has digital radio, USB slots, electric window openers in the back and many other things we didn’t have in our old car.
- Then Stef arrived at the end of the month and we visited Beveridge Park in Kirkcaldy, and the beach there, then the next day we met in Edinburgh for the Lego store, lunch at The Real Greek and an open-top bus tour.
What did your May look like?
Fiona
pippastef
worldofblyton
World of Blyton 
So what’s the title of the third “Night at the Museum” movie? We only knew of two (taking place in NYC and in D. C.).
I’ve read James Herriot’s 4 autobiographies way back in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s. I absolutely adored Christopher Timothy and Carol Drinkwater as James and Helen Herriot in the original TV series filmed in Askrigg, Yorkshire Dales (which we finally visited in May 2019).
The new TV series is nice, too, but the actors don’t have the chemistry that the actors from 45+ years ago had.
In May I read “After all these Years” by Susan Isaacs, “Mayflower” by Nathaniel Philbrick (I met this author in the sumer of 2006 when he signed this book on Cape Cod), “The Winds of War” by Herman Wouk, a book on the different German Famous Five translations between 1953 and 2015 by Lucia Marjanovic, Chesley Sullenberger’s autobiography (the pilot who landed his airplane in January 2009 on the Hudson Riveer in NYC), “The Best of Everything” by Rona Jaffe (“Class Reunion” is way better!), “Two little Girls in blue” by Mary Higgins Clark and “The Librarian of Burned Books” by Brianna Labuskes which I cannot recommend as it’s set in 3 different times and it’s about 3 different women which simply gets too confusing.
I don’t seem to have much look with newly published books…
We would have loved to go to a movie theater in May, but other than animation and dystopian movies nothing interesting was running, so now we can’t wait to see “Indiana Jones” part 5 with Harrison Ford later in June.
Before I got a cold we went to Moore State Park and I posted all photos on my FB page.
We had a heat wave in May, but fortunately it cooled down again!
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Night at the Museum 3 is Secret of the Tomb.
“The tablet that brings Larry Daley’s friends at the museum to life at night has started decaying. Larry embarks on an adventurous journey in order to prevent the tablet’s magic from disappearing.” The only ones who might know how to fix the tablet are Ahkmenrah’s parents who are in the British Museum.
I will probably watch Indie 5 at some point as I love the original trilogy – the fourth was a travesty though!
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Thank you, Fiona!
I just requested “Secret of the Tomb” from our public library which can get us more movies than Netflix. Often I check Netflix first for a certain movie title and they don’t have it. But the Massachusetts library system does.
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Your May made me look lazy AF
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Lemme at that Lego.
I’m building several Lego Technic models at the moment.
Thanks Fiona.
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