May showers bring June flowers

So, I was all set to do another wrap up post like last year's "Thoughts on 31 days of blogging," but here it is, 10:22 p.m. on 5/31, and any further thoughts I have on 31 days of blogging are not particularly coherent. Though this moment does, in fact, feel emblematic of the whole blogathon. You can have a plan, but sometimes other things get in the way, and then you need an alternative. And if you're a person who told yourself that you were going to finish the goddamn blogathon whether you liked it or not, then you're going to finish it however you can, even if you have to limp a bit across the finish line.

I don't know if I learned anything new, really, having done this 3 times now. I still know that I would have trouble keeping up with daily blogging for more than a month. But I also know that I really do like blogging, and it gives me impetus to continue. The one bit of advice I have for future blogathoners is to plan, plan, plan, and when you think you've planned ahead enough, plan some more. I felt pretty good through week two, and then I looked at my list of ideas for posts and I'd used most of them already, and the second half of the month started looking really, really long.

Thankfully, just when I was in need of a last post to get me safely into June, my flowers cooperated. I woke up this morning to discover that my oriental poppy (which, for reasons I don't understand, I seem to have planted right next to the compost pile) went from having one bloom to eight, overnight.


And while the clematis does not quite have a grasp on actually growing up the broken ladder as it's supposed to, it does seem to have mastered producing flowers for the first time, so that's something.

And with that, I wish everyone a happy June! Thanks for reading.