May Favourites: May I Interest You in Some Actual Sunshine?

Let me tell you something about May in Canada.

After January (rude), February (longest short month in history), March (bold liar), and April (promising, but still pulling its punches), May finally, finally delivers. The temperature climbs. The days are noticeably longer. You step outside and it smells like something is actually alive out there.

Warmer weather changes everything for me. My mood lifts. My brain works better. I actually want to do things, and voluntarily leave the house. January Tracy would not recognize this version of me.

This month’s edit is a bit of a mixed bag: a piece of technology I’ve been wearing for five years, the trees in my backyard that make me stop and stare in awe every morning, and a self-tanner that, despite a long and troubling history with self-tanners, has not betrayed me.

What Five Years of Sleep Data Has To Say

I have been wearing an Oura Ring for five years, and I am still obsessed with it. Five years is a long time for me to stay loyal to a piece of technology. I have gone through gadgets, apps, planners, fitness trackers, and various “life-changing” systems with enthusiasm and hope that this will be the thing. Most of them are now in drawers, gathering dust.

If you haven’t heard of the Oura Ring yet: it’s a smart ring that tracks your health metrics and feeds everything into an app. Sleep quality, heart rate, body temperature, respiration, steps, stress indicators. All of it, on your finger, around the clock. It’s lightweight and comfortable to wear. Slightly thicker than a regular ring, but once it’s on, you stop noticing it. It comes in several finishes (gold, silver, black, etc.), and you charge it every four to five days. A full charge only takes about thirty minutes.

Here’s why it matters to me beyond just being a fun gadget.

I’m in that delightful stretch between peri-menopause and full menopause, which is less of a “stage of life” and more of a surprise variety show hosted by your hormones. If you are there too, you already know it affects everything: sleep, mood, memory, energy, body temperature, patience, tolerance for nonsense, and your ability to remember why you walked into a room. This has been going on for years. My sleep can go sideways without warning, and a bad night ripples through the whole next day in a way it simply didn’t ten years ago. My doctor is always asking about patterns, symptoms, timing. And being able to answer those questions with actual data, instead of a shrug and “I don’t know, maybe three weeks ago?”, is genuinely useful.

Movement tracking is the other feature I rely on. It prompts me when I’ve been sedentary too long, and there is something about seeing the actual data that makes “I should probably move” feel like a real thing rather than a vague intention I can ignore while standing in front of the fridge. Nine times out of ten, it results in me putting the leash on the dog. The dog is thrilled. My body is better for it. Everyone wins, except maybe the squirrels.

The stress indicators I take with a grain of salt. The ring has, on more than one occasion, confidently declared me Very Stressed on what was, by all accounts, a perfectly fine Tuesday. I don’t dispute it. I take it as a nudge to breathe and put my phone down, not as a medical opinion.

The feature I think is genuinely underrated is the tag function. You can log ‘activities’ or ‘events’ alongside your metrics: drank wine, bad sleep, had a cold, travelling, had a period, new medication, or just felt off, or whatever else is relevant to your actual life. You can create custom tags too. Over time this builds a personal health log that connects your body data to your actual life. When I’m at a doctor’s appointment and they ask about patterns, I can actually answer with certainty. For anyone navigating a stage where your body is doing unexpected things, this alone is worth the price.

A note on cost: the ring itself isn’t cheap (they start at $469 CDN), and there is a subscription fee on top of the hardware if you want all the cool tracking. Without the subscription, the app still works, but you’re limited to basic data like your heart rate and step count. The daily sleep score, trend graphs, readiness score, stress tracking, period prediction, personalised insights, etc… are all behind the paywall. In Canada, the annual membership is $89.99, which works out to about $7.50 a month. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m fairly ‘anti-subscription’ about technology (it’s gotten out of control in my opinion), but for me, this one has been worth it. It gives me information I actually act on. And at this stage of life, understanding what my body is doing feels less like a luxury and more like basic necessity.

Spring’s Best Performance Is In My Backyard

About fifteen years ago, my husband and kids gave me magnolia trees for Mother’s Day. Four of them, planted in a row along my back fence. From my kitchen window, the kitchen table, and my bedroom, I can see them all year round. For most of the year they are a nice, lush green, and I appreciate them and the way they hide the fence and make the backyard feel less suburban.

And then, every spring, they put on a spectacular show!

Magnolias bloom before their leaves come in, and what you get are these bare-bark branches covered in enormous pink and white flowers. No leaves, no green, just this sudden, slightly surreal explosion of colour against whatever grey sky is still lingering. They typically bloom for about two weeks. I watch them every day, and I take approximately two hundred photos that all basically look the same. Every year I become the same woman: standing at the window, phone in hand, whispering “look at them”. No one in my house reacts with the same, appropriate level of enthusiasm. This is their failing, not mine.

The soil where we live is genuinely terrible. High clay content, compacted, and generally hostile. It is the kind of ground that looks at a new shrub and says, “good luck, sweetheart”. Many a tree have quietly perished on our property over the years, despite my best intentions and several hopeful trips to the garden centre. The magnolias? Completely unbothered. No special fertilizer, no coddling. They just thrive, which is more than I can say for myself after a long winter.

It doesn’t stop there. As the magnolia blossoms are finishing up and the petals start to fall, the lilacs take over!

I have five lilac bushes, all completely random purchases. As it turns out, they’re all different varieties, which means they have slightly different bloom times. What this has (accidentally) created is a rotating lilac situation that runs for the rest of the month. As one finishes, another is just starting. It’s like a fragrant relay race. Every vase in my house gets filled. The kitchen, the bedroom, the office, the living room. The whole house smells like lilac for weeks, and I walk around feeling delighted.

I did not engineer this, it was just dumb luck. But if you’re planning a garden and you like lilacs, buying different varieties on purpose would be a very smart move.

Summer Ready Skin, Without The Consequences

May means warmer weather, which means dressing for warmer weather, which means more skin is on display. My skin is the colour of a person who has spent the last five months inside, which is because I have.

I do not suntan. I have spent too many years and too much money on skincare treatments trying to undo the damage. For more on that, have a read of my vascular laser experience here. But the alternative, showing up in May looking like I’m in witness protection, also isn’t ideal.

Enter self-tanner. I know. I know the face you’re making. The smell. The streaks. The orange knees and tell-tale palms. Trust me, I have tried nearly every brand and technique, plus I am at the age where I do not have the patience for finicky products that require a full prep ritual, and still betray you.

The Bondi Sands Gradual Tanning Milk is the one that finally made it easy.

It’s a lightweight moisturiser that gives you a very subtle hint of colour. Not tan. Just a less aggressive pale. I use it twice a week on my legs, arms, and face, and it just takes the edge off. My skin looks like it’s seen the outdoors, and that’s all I want.

Prep is minimal. I do recommend a shower mitt once or twice a week to keep the skin exfoliated and the colour even, but that’s genuinely it. No forty-five minute ritual, no special applicator mitt, no specific drying positions, no stained sheets.

The smell is the detail I want to highlight, because it’s the reason many of us abandon self-tanner. That biscuit smell. I cannot stand it. This one has a mild cocoa scent that’s genuinely pleasant. I do prefer unscented body lotion, however this I can tolerate twice a week to look my best.

The bottle is translucent (so you can see how much is left, which sounds minor until you’ve run out mid-application!) and has a pump. Wash your hands after using it, or your palms will be several shades ahead of the rest of you.

Pro tip: for streak-free application on your face or the backs of your hands without staining your palms, use a large fluffy powder brush. Pump a small amount onto the bristles and buff it in. You can hit exactly where the sun would naturally catch you, your hands stay clean, and the result looks completely blended and natural.

Bondi Sands is available at most drugstores or on Amazon. It’s not expensive, and is often on sale. And for someone who avoids the sun and still wants to look like they’ve been outside at least once this spring, it does exactly what it’s supposed to.

A Very Good Month

That’s May.

A ring that knows more about my sleep than I do. Magnolia trees that bloom every spring like they’re showing off, and the lilac follow-up act that keeps my house smelling extraordinary for a month. And a self-tanner that finally managed to give me a bit of colour without a single orange knee.

Spring is good for me. My mood is better, my energy is better, and I am a more productive and frankly more tolerable person when the sun comes out. I suspect I’m not alone in that.

What’s made your May? Leave it in the comments. I’m always curious, and looking for recommendations. Want more Everyday Edits? Check out previous months here.

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