I usually find the Met Office forecast to get fairly near to reality, but this morning they have boobed. In the last few minutes it has become overcast with some quite dark looking clouds, but before that it was sunny, with a lot of clear sky.
   Today it seems the BBC's (Meteogroup) forecast came closer to predicting the morning weather. It is still not quite right because what I can actually see is a build up of heavy cloud, and it seems the sun is going to have a hard time breaking through that lot again. Both forecast's seem to agree that this afternoon is going to range between rain and heavy rain, with the Met Office saying it will start an hour earlier at 1pm. The BBC say it will be 17° C, and the Met Office say it will be just 16° C. On the whole, it is looking like a mostly nasty sort of day. Tomorrow may see light cloud with a few sunny spells, but it is going to be cold, or almost cold, at just 14° C.

   Yesterday could be described as "a quiet day", and that could be code for saying I hardly did anything of note. If I had known that the afternoon would feature a fair amount of sunshine I might have gone for another walk. It would have been probably very useful to have done so for reasons I'll explain when I say something about this morning.

  There are really just three things of note that I did yesterday. The first was to do the smelly washing up that had been mouldering in the sink for a few days. The second was to strip the few useful bit from the old PC I had been playing with, and hiding the remains at the bottom of the wheelie bin. The third thing almost doesn't count despite being very important. I started making a backup of the home directory of my current PC. This is very important for when I try and get my new PC up and working.

  I will copy the home directory from the old PC hard drive to the new hard drive for the new PC. That should not cause any difficulties, but if some disaster happens I have a backup to work from. (By the time I do this I may have two backups - you can't be too careful with a huge collection of photos going back to 1966, although most are from about 1990 onwards). As I said, this may not count because after spending a few minutes setting the backup process it then proceeds by itself. The complete backup took 16 hours to run, and nearly used up the whole hard disk because I had changed the way I store my photos, and backing up onto an existing backup effectively duplicated many years of photos.

  Through the day I did spent odd minutes, maybe as little as 5 or 10 minutes, doing odd little jobs, but I spent most of the day just reading - sometimes from book, and sometimes from screen. I think I was surprised that I didn't get bored through the day. Somehow the day seemed to pass with rude haste. The only major marker for time was thinking about dinner. At midday, or soon after, I had some lunch. It was just two bowls of "cup noodles". They are actually more like soup with some very thin ribbon pasta in them. 95% of it, once made up, is just flavoured water. They are very low in calories, and seem to have negligible amounts of sugar in them.

  My dinner was Indian takeaway part 2. I had keema rice with a mixed vegetable bhaji. For a "dessert" I had the other portion of chicken tikka. That still leaves me a lamb biryani and another vegetable side dish for dinner tonight. It also leaves me the base, literally, for a dinner tomorrow night. I have one nan bread that I might use for beans on toast, maybe with some cheese, and maybe with some Marmite for tomorrow's dinner. Sometimes I think that when used sparingly, Indian takeways can be quite cheap meals. Although the nan bread will not be a complete meal, four meals for £24 is not that bad. (Yes, I know it would be cheaper still if I worked from fresh, raw ingredients, but....).

  After my bad sleep the previous night I was expecting to fall asleep instantly last night, but I was awake for at least an hour before getting to sleep. I may have woken up about every 2 hours in the night, and every time I thought I would not be able to get back to sleep. I guess that in reality it took little more than 10 minutes. It's just that time can seem stretched in the dark of the night.

  I had lots of dreams that didn't seem to have any special inspiration last night. As usual I can recall very few details, but a few snapshots seem to have almost stuck. My first dream, which may have been two dreams in sequence, happened very early in the night. The only thing I can remember was a laser blowing up near the horizon. I assume it was some sort of weapon, although obviously not one that should explode. On each occasion there was a blinding white light in the distance. It wasn't blinding enough to literally blind, but still incredibly bright. On one of the two episodes I think there was some concern about radiation. The other big difference is that I seemed to be in two different places for each explosion.

  Later on I had another dream. In this dream my mum, at least I think it was my mum, had bought a new house, and there were some old graves in the front garden. They had been there for a couple of hundred years. (This was maybe inspired by the graves I had seen in the oldest parts of Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery.)  We decided to remove the stone, and maybe use it for something else. There seemed to be an "edit" in the story line because the next thing I knew was the slabs of stone propped up against the side of the house, and just an area of front garden with no grass on it. There was probably more to it, but as I said, I can only remember snapshots from most dreams.

  My final dream was obviously a lot of small dreams that seemed to be part of a bigger story.  I was in North London, and I had apparently walked there to see some friends. The location was almost the same house as the one featuring the gravestones, but this had no graves. Instead, in once corner there were deep holes in the ground leading down to underground rooms. It was as if the surface features had been removed to reveal what was below.

  One of the people I was with jumped down to explore, but I thought it was too far down for me. I then did a bit of exploration on the surface and found an easy way down. It wasn't long before I found a sign with the old GPO logo on it. It soon became evident that these were old cable tunnels, and equipment rooms, and probably dated back to WW2. There was lots more to explore, but I found myself back in the house where a low key party was taking place.

  The next thing I knew is that it was getting near dawn, and I decided to go home. I knew I had walked there, and assumed I would walk back, but I had no good idea of what direction I needed to take. I headed off in a direction I thought might be right. Suddenly I found myself on the top deck of a bus, and passing a road sign saying North End N21. I have no idea if such a road exists in reality, but in the dream it gave me a starting point to find where I was, and what direction to start walking. I woke up very soon after.

  This morning I overslept again. Of course this didn't matter in the least. Once again it was a case of waking up as much as 90 minutes earlier, and trying for maybe 5 minutes extra sleep. 90 minutes was a bonus. I guess I don't feel too bad this morning, but there is some very mild bad news...or maybe part of it was not mild, but with extra thought maybe it isn't so bad yet.

  My blood glucose was up a bit this morning, but only to 7.3mmol/l. On second thoughts this is not bad news at all because it is less than my recent monthly average of 7.5 - although this month's average has turned out to be 8.09mmol/l. I think the diabetes nurse would still say that is very acceptable, and somewhere near the pre-diabetic level (although I can't remember what that is exactly). The news that is sort of bad is that I was hoping to announce that I had lost 3kg this month, but I missed by a mere 300gm. However, when I thought about it properly I should be comparing my weight on the first of this month with the first of next month - which is tomorrow. It could be possible to shave off at least 100gm by tomorrow morning - maybe even a bit more.

  Ideally I should really be dieting hard today, and should go for a 6 mile walk. I don't think I can manage either, but if I am quick I may still be able to get in a few miles before the heavens open. It is even possible that I could even see a bit of sunshine. The sun is actually trying to shine now, but the best it can manage is a bright disk shining through the cloud. Nevertheless, the forecast has been significantly more negative than reality, and reality may yet spring more surprises.

Footnote: Apologies if my grammar has gone to pot, or I have missed entire words towards the end of this. As usual I have been rushing, and not bothering to check most of what I have written. I am still in a rush so the rest has to stay as it is.