The forecast doesn't show it, but at the moment it looks like there could be a sunny spell or two. I can see some small areas of blue among the clouds, and one almost lined up with the sun just now. This morning has started off fairly mild, for early January, about 7° C, and as the day progresses it will get warmer and warmer. By 6pm it could be 13° C, and if it were sunny it would be shirt sleeve weather. Sadly it will be after dark, and even before that, from 2pm, it is likely to be heavily overcast. It is in the early afternoon where there is a small chance of rain, but none is expected to fall. Tomorrow is predicted to start at 13° C, and even as the day ends at midnight, it may still be 11° C. It will probably be overcast, and there seems to be a small chance of rain for most of the day until 5pm when rain is expected to fall until midnight or later.

   Yesterday was probably dominated by my cold getting worse after it previously seemed to be coming to an end. In the morning it didn't seem too bad, and I was still thinking I might go out for a walk. However there was a complication. I was expecting a parcel delivery from Amazon, and I noted that the tracking info said the courier left the Dartford depot a couple of hours earlier than usual. I had fears that my parcel could arrive before I got home from my walk/visit to the pub.

  I was saved from worrying about that when a few minutes after finishing my morning shower my doorbell rang. I struggled to pull a pair of trousers on my still damp legs, and then rushed down to the front door. It was my parcel, and it was still not quite 11am. Some parcels are exciting, and some mundane. This parcel almost fell into the latter camp. It contained three items. One was some blood glucose test strips. I do get them on prescription, but not in the quantity I am getting through them as I try to regulate my blood glucose level for my next visit to the Diabetes nurse in 7 days time.

  Another item was no more exciting than some large-ish aluminium food containers. It was only the 99p shop that had these semi-large containers, and then only rarely. They are the perfect size for my mini oven/grill, and the aluminium lids they come with make great baking/grilling trays. I will admit that it is not such a cheap solution as lining the official tray that came with the oven with aluminium foil, but it is a damn handy solution.

  The third item was exciting...or maybe it wasn't. It was a little box with probably a miniature Linux computer in it. It has one USB socket for a 3G dongle, and an ethernet socket to connect to my local network. Basically it, together with the 3G USB dongle, is a modem to allow me use wireless broadband when Virgin Media's cable broadband fails - which in reality is quite rare. Of course I could do this already by plugging in the 3G dongle to one PC at a time, but this little box will feed my entire network, and anything connected to it. Most importantly, I will be connecting it to the Red, or dirty side of my firewall. It can also act as a wifi access point, but that is a facility I am not expecting to use.

  I said that maybe it wasn't really an exciting thing for one reason alone. Unlike the years old Tenda WiFi access point that I have had for quite a few years now, and never used, this 3G modem was simple in the extreme to set up. I never did get the Tenda WiFi point working they way I wanted it to work. It seems to be designed to work their way, and not to work my way !

  It was just before midday when I heard from Angela to say she still wasn't back at work. As much as I want to see Angela, it was sort of good news because I was starting to feel rotten again. Maybe fresh air might have made a difference, but I was coughing a lot, and my nose was starting to run. It was almost as if the day before, when I seemed to be over the cold, hadn't actually happened. Later on it would get worse still.

  I think I was mostly pre-occupied with trying to avoid eating anything. I was determined to try and get one good blood glucose reading to enter into my diary. One distraction was to do some laundry. I had several miscellaneous things that needed washing, and I had an idea that working with steamy water could be good for my nose and throat. The flaw in that idea was that the water, while warm, and indeed a perfect temperature for a shower, was not "steamy". I don't think it did any good, but it didn't do any harm either. However it needed doing sooner or later.

  I am almost forgetting the biggest distraction of the day. It was scanning loads of CD covers to post on social media as part of one of those stupid challenges that swirl around social media. I couldn't even remember what the rules were supposed to be for this challenge, and so I made it up as I went along. In one day, instead of spreading it out over 10 days (that was one of the rules), I showed off a selection of some of my favourite CDs/albums. The important point I wanted to make is that they were all equally important, and none were "best".

  Just before dinner, but not before I had eaten a snack of some mixed nuts, I checked my blood glucose. It was exactly the same as in the morning. I got a reading of 7mmol/l, and while I would have preferred 5 or 6, it seemed good enough, and was comfortably under the danger concern limit of 10. Even more surprising was that this morning the reading was, for the third time, exactly 7 again.

  My evening was not pleasant. My cough was getting worse, and my nose was prone to dripping. It was like I was in the middle of a bad cold, and not, as I once thought, at the end of an almost mild cold. With the aid of some Paracetamol I managed to calm the cough down enough to get to sleep, and for a while it seemed like I had been sleeping well. I think it was just before 2am, with 3 or 4 hours sleep under my belt, that I woke up for a pee.

  I woke up with my mouth dry and sticky. My cheek was actually stuck to my teeth ! I guess I must have been snoring like a church organ ! I had a small drink, and then went to the toilet. I was halfway through my wee when I started coughing like it was going out of fashion. I had to try and get that cough under control before me wee started to flow again. I think I was coughing non stop as I made my way back to bed. It was then I made a big mistake. I sort of threw myself onto my right side. That made me ribs go crunch, and at the same time I also couldn't stop a big, convulsing cough.

  The pain from my ribs or chest felt a lot like a heart attack, and maybe it was one, but it did respond to painkillers, and also some antacid tablets - it felt like twisted ribs combined with some heartburn. It may have been 90 minutes before I felt comfortable enough to get back to sleep. Once I did get to sleep I seemed to sleep OK again. The next time I woke up was less dramatic than that first time. The time after that included a big distraction - I was woken up by a message from Angela to say she wasn't really ready to go back to work, but she was going to go anyway.

  My own experience of doing the same thing was that I would actually feel a lot better for the exercise, the fresh air, and maybe just a change of scenery. Very often I would be feeling good by home time. I hope the same is true for Angela. I now have the incentive to get out into the fresh air in the hope we will meet in the pub at lunchtime. I have to be aware that Angela may be too busy to have a proper lunch break, and won't be in the pub, but hope springs eternal !
   I don't think this is "my" fox, but I saw this fox catching a few rays of sunshine yesterday morning. It was on the roof of a neighbours shed a few gardens beyond the back of mine.

  There was one other thing this morning that was good news (apart from the message from Angela). It was my weight. In these days when I feel rotten to some degree or another, it is hard to regulate my food as well as I might like, and yet my weight wasn't bad this morning. If I can loose just half a kilogram by the 14th of this month, which under normal circumstances wouldn't be too hard, I would be able to show the Diabetes nurse a small improvement over the recorded weight when I was weighed by the Dietician on the 2nd of January. If I can do that, and the occasional short peaks in my blood glucose level are overlooked, I may get another (imaginary) gold star from the Diabetes Nurse.