The forecast says partly cloudy, and I say sunny intervals. Who's to say who is right ? Maybe they mean the same thing. Anyway, the latest revision to the forecast has changed the headline to Sunny Intervals, and also changed the maximum temperature to 13° C for a few hours this afternoon. To sum up, today will not be awful, but it won't be all that nice.  The temperature is going to drop a lot tonight, and tomorrow may start no warmer than 5° C. It might be a sunny morning, but from midday it will probably be very similar to today.

  I guess I was suffering from the lockdown blues yesterday. I seemed to have no motivation, and it made me feel tired and lazy. Maybe I was actually tired. I did doze off a few times when reading while laying on my bed. The odd thing is that I felt I had slept well during the night, but maybe I didn't. That doesn't bode well for today when it feels like I might have slept worse than the previous night.

  The one thing I could have done to cheer myself up would have been to go for a walk, but I just couldn't raise the enthusiasm. All this could have been triggered by something else than lockdown blues, but then lockdown blues took over. There were two "something elses" that weighed heavily on my mind. The first was the builders bucket of stone cold laundry that I had meant to finish the day before, but somehow it just got left until yesterday morning when it was stone cold, and extremely unpleasant. It wasn't much to do, and I finished it early enough to get it on the line outside in time to 93% dry by the end of the afternoon.

  The other thing that dampened my enthusiasm was that I still needed to properly terminate an Ethernet cable on an RJ45 plug. Pictured on the left are two RJ45 connectors - one on a professionally made cable, and the other a brand new plug waiting to be used. An Ethernet cable has 8 wires made from 4 lots of twisted pairs. To terminate the cable with a plug each wire has to be untwisted, and fanned out into the correct order to push down through the thin channels inside the plastic shell of the plug. This either works first time or it fights you through every step !

  The ease or difficulty putting one of these plugs on the end of the cable depends on some variables. The first variable is which end of the cable. The twisted pairs try to retain their twist, and in one direction they help the wires stay where you want them. In the other direction they are very badly behaved. The second variable is the type of wire. Some is made very flexible if it is to be used as a patch cable, and some is quite stiff if it is for permanent installation.

  They day before yesterday I had wasted a whole load of time trying to put a plug on some bright orange cable that felt like it was good quality because it seemed clean and soft. I think I had three attempts, and although it looked OK, I had managed to cross over two white wires, crossed over the brown and brown/white wires without realising, and thirdly managed to get one wire too short to actually make a good connection. Yesterday I had one more go, and messed that one up as well. Fortunately I had one other long bit of Ethernet cable, and it had much stiffer wires in it. All the wires stayed in the right order as I slipped the plug on, and the job was done in about one single minute ! This allowed me to check my new security camera (actually for watching foxes and other wildlife in my garden) out in a more realistic way.
  At the moment the camera is propped up on the window looking out from inside the house to the garden. The picture above is a screenshot from my PC. Today I may screw it to the wall outside the kitchen to give a full view of the garden. My first tests show the camera, which I think cost £36, to produce very good pictures, but bad video. The bad video feels like a bottleneck somewhere which is seriously slowing the update of the picture. The bottleneck could be in my PC rather than the network. The video did seem almost natural when viewed on my mobile phone for some reason. Once installed I will try playing around with bit rates and stuff on the main and sub streams (the sub stream is a lower quality stream for slower connections).

   One thing I was very impressed with was that the camera was still showing a full colour, albeit rather grainy, image when it was almost dark outside. When it is fully dark it has infra red illumination built in, and I can imagine that will have enough infra red light to light up the whole garden quite well. If I can sort out the slow and jerky video, it could turn out I have bought a bargain.

  I don't know how I did it, but yesterday was another day when I didn't each much before dinner time despite feeling bored. Maybe it was because I was bored and listless. Perhaps it was too much bother to go down and raid the kitchen....who knows ? I could potentially have made a nice dinner with the assorted ingredients I had in the fridge and cupboard, but I decided it was time to spent yet more money on a takeaway chicken shish kebab. It was while ordering it that I found too much enthusiasm, and also ordered 8 "spicy wings" to go with the kebab. As usual I ordered a spare kebab to eat tonight.

  The big mistake I made was partly down to confusion. There are about three places I order kebabs from, and one does grilled wings. They are skinless and apart from some natural fat being left, are basically fat free. The place I ordered from yesterday deep fries their wings, and they are covered in crispy batter. I suspect it was that batter that was instrumental in spoiling a run of good blood glucose readings this morning. The reading was 8.0mmol/l, and while it is well clear of the 10mmol/l limit, it was not as good as more typical figures in the low sevens.

  I spent a bit of time reading in bed last night, but I think I was still fast asleep by 10pm (plus or minus half an hour). I seemed to sleep quite well apart from one thing. I woke up several times with a really dry mouth. I suppose I had been snoring or something. All I do know is that I seemed to have a few dreams that featured snow, and some dreams that were set in the time I was working as a bench TV engineer. One such dream was a bit of a mild nightmare because I was being given stuff that was not TVs, and that I had no experience at repairing - things such as sub miniature camcorders, or music players. One thing seemed to be some sort of incomplete games console. I had no idea how I was going to repair these things, but fortunately the dream faded out before I even reached my bench with the stuff I was supposed to repair.

  I initially woke just after 5am, and I did consider something I had been thinking about since learning that we can now go out for exercise more than once since lockdown was slightly relaxed. I considered going out for an early, but probably short walk. I might have even done it if it wasn't so cold and grey outside. Instead of getting up I went back to bed, and to my surprise I was soon asleep again, and I slept for about another 90 minutes.

  This morning I don't feel so low, and I will go for at least one walk, although I am still contemplating a mid morning walk, and a late afternoon walk. But, if I actually do them, might be fairly short - perhaps a mile and half each time. I almost feel OK, and I am sure that a walk will sort out some stiffness in my legs. The unknown is my chest. I seem to have "twisted a rib" again. Certain movements cause some stabs of pain in a few places near the bottom of my rib cages. None of the pain I have felt has been very strong, but it is still unpleasant. It is the sort of pain that could be made worse by cold air, and it will still only be 13° C if I go on a mid afternoon walk. I think this is something that I will decide on when I am halfway out the front door.

  I would like to get in a bit of shopping today, and so I will have to go out somewhere at some time, but I haven't decided where I will go yet. I'd like to go to Aldi at some point, but I am thinking an early visit may be best, but it is 9.30am already, and I am not even washed and dressed yet ! Maybe I will try Aldi tomorrow morning.