The sky has been grey all morning, but the latest revision to the forecast says we should soon get some sunny intervals, and maybe an hour or two of non stop sunshine late in the afternoon. There is one intriguing bit of the forecast for 9am. Apparently it won't rain despite there being a 71% chance it will. I am always confused by this odd concept where the information for one hour can contradict itself. Some of the clouds out there do look like they could drop a bit of rain, and so we'll just have to see what happens. With luck the afternoon temperature will be a reasonable 22° C. Tomorrow will be a fair bit cooler, probably no more than 18° C, but it seems it will be a very sunny day.

  I had several ideas for what I might do yesterday. The original idea was based on there being thunderstorms in the morning. I assumed a fair downpour would limit, or ideally eliminate any queues outside the supermarkets, and I was hoping to go shopping in Aldi. That idea was eliminated upon seeing the revised forecast early in the morning (although at 6am, or thereabouts, there was still the possibility of one short thunderstorm that I may have been able to use).

  My revised idea was that I might go out for another walk. I had even considered jumping on a train to Beckenham Hill station (less than 9 minutes away), and have a wander around Beckenham Place Park. I didn't do that either. It was one of those mornings where time seemed to slip by in a way that it never did while I was at work. Before I knew it, it was gone midday, and at that point I hadn't even had a shower or washed my hair.

  I think it was almost getting on for 1pm before I had that shower, and washed my hair. It was quite useful that I did because it would have been easy not to bother on the basis that I would not be going out to see anyone - not even a shop keeper. That all changed at 3pm when my neighbour from round the corner, Michael, phoned me up to see how I was doing, and to ask if I fancied having a beer in his front garden - spaced 2 metres from each other.
  That sounded like a good idea to me, and I told him I would chill a couple of beers, and be around in about 30 minutes time. That wasn't really enough to chill the beer properly, but it was cool enough to enjoy. I am not sure how long I was there, but it was probably more then 90 minutes in the hot sunshine. I only drank two small cans of beer, and one small bottle of beer, and so I was 100% sober when I left...or was I ?

  I am not sure how it happened, but I was drinking that beer on an almost completely empty stomach. All I had eaten was a couple of lumps of cheese at about 7am. It was not a breakfast, but I just wanted something to nibble on. I think I will blame the beer for not wanting to be creative, and cook up some sort of dinner from the few ingredients left in the fridge (although if it was a cold and wet day I have a fair selection of canned food I could have heated up).

   I worry more and more about my bank balance, but I still ended up ordering a takeway. This time I used Just Eat. I tried ordering it from yet another kebab shop - except it was really a pizza shop that did kebabs - weird ! The salad didn't seem to have the traditional red cabbage and onion, and a lot of it was thinly sliced iceberg lettuce (I think) and that was not as crisp as cabbage, but it wasn't bad. The meat was pretty good, but the chilli sauce was the more usual tame stuff.

  I think I was also blame the beer for making me feel extra hungry - so hungry that I also ate the spare kebab ! To be honest they seemed more "medium" than large, and by omitting the pitta bread it was not a huge dinner. I did feel a bit of guilt about that, and not just for the money I had spent. However half the guilt was not needed. This morning my weight is approaching an all time low. My blood glucose has also dropped a bit.

  I felt a bit restless in the evening, and after watching one episode of Star Trek I missed a portion of the next episode (one shown on the "Pick" channel, and the other on the "Horror Channel") when I went out to water the garden. I had finished that in time to catch the end of the Star Trek episode. I can't remember what was going on in that episode, but I do remember it ended with the crew of the star ship clapping. This was at 8pm, and I wondered why I could hear other clapping. I have never heard it before, probably because my double glazed windows block the sound, but some neighbours from the road opposite were doing the 8pm clap for the NHS thing. I had to close the window to keep the maniacal sound out.

  I lost track of time after that. I went to bed soon after, but just to read for a while. For some reason I feel it might have been later, but I also seem to think I might have been asleep by 9pm. I seemed to have a pretty fair sleep, but by 1 or 2am I was feeling a bit cool, and had to spend a bit of time trying different amounts of limbs to cover, or uncover to get the optimum temperature.

  This morning I starting to feel sleepy again. There is no reason why I shouldn't go back to bed, but I doubt I will. Other than that I feel OK. Resting my legs and feet for a day probably wasn't a bad idea, but I can't stop for too long. This grey morning is not very inspiring, but I have one definite thing to do before anything else this morning. I was just about to wash a few t-shirts and some underwear when Michael phoned me yesterday. I got as far as putting the stuff into soak in detergent, and then abandoned it to go and see Michael. This morning I have to deal with that cold soapy water and cold soggy clothes.

  It is supposed to brighten up sooner or later, although there is no hint of it yet, and I will probably go for a walk, and probably get a little bit of shopping while I am out. On the other hand I did start to get interested in another project yesterday. I have a DVD player/recorder that I bought ages ago. After using it in recording mode you need to "finalize" the recordable DVD disk so it can be played on other players (or on a PC). I am sure I did successfully do that once when I first bought the machine (from Tesco of all places !).

  Later attempts at finalizing disks would all fail, and the disk would then be unreadable even in the machine that recorded it. I was recently reminded that such a machine would make digitising analogue tapes easy - if only it would work. I recently came up with a theory that the machine relied on there being a good bit of empty space on the disk to do whatever it needs to do to finalize the disk. If nothing else, finalizing write a menu structure, and so needs space. I am wondering if I need to keep the recordings a lot shorter than the machine says it can record might be the answer to this problem. If I don't see enough sunshine to enthuse me, I might end up playing with that DVD recorder - and potentially spending a lot of time actually using it if I can make it work. I still have a lot of VHS tapes it would be nice to digitize.