The forecast has been revised since I took the screenshot above. It now seems it will be raining by 11am, and it ain't gonna stop until midnight. Some of that rain, possibly most of it from late afternoon, is going to be heavy. Today's maximum temperature is only going to be 10° C, and it may not get there until 6pm !  Tomorrow may be a bit brighter, but there will probably still be some showers. It will be a little warmer less cold tomorrow with the temperature expected to rise to the dizzy heights of 13° C by early afternoon.
 
   One thing I had forgotten about when copying the /home directory to the new 2TB hard disk for my new computer, was that it wasn't copying the "hidden" files. Some contain useful information that would be needed for my new PC. They would be copied when I ran a proper backup program. I used "Lucky Backup" to update the 2TB hard disk with any small changes that had been made since I had started the original copying. That would have only taken 5 or 10 minutes, but the hidden files made the backup process take a few more hours. The upshot of this is that I wouldn't be ready to start getting my new PC running until after lunch time.

  I have to admit I was in the right mood to lay back on my bed reading to pass the rest of the morning. I was really only interrupted once in a major way when it appeared that my morning constipation was at an end. Quite why it took so long is a mystery, but I did feel a lot better after that ! I think I even had a snooze during the morning. I don't know how long it lasted, but at a guess it may have been around half an hour.

  Before I started on the new PC I fancied some lunch. I didn't want anything heavy, and opted for some home made soup - where "soup" equals half a can of washed chick peas in spiced up Oxo roast chicken gravy. It was quite tasty, and I may well do something similar with the other half of the can of chick peas today. I believe, rightly or wrongly, that it should have been fairly low in everything but fibre.

  Finally it was time to work on my new PC. I had fitted the 120GB, solid state, system disk the day before, and fitting the 2TB, conventional "spinning rust" hard disk didn't take long. Fitting the carrier back into the chassis was fiddly work until I got the angles just right, and it seemed to fall back into place. The same was true for the DVD drive which also clips in. There are very few screws in this Dell Optiplex 7010 PC.

  With the computer re-assembled I came across my first hurdle. What I thought were HDMI ports to connect to the monitor were actually Display Port ports. They look similar to HDMI, but are not the same. Fortunately there was a conventional 15 pin VGA socket. It seems to work fine, but I have a possibly irrational idea that the Display Port connections would be better in some way. I have ordered a pair of Display Port to HDMI leads, and will use one when they arrive, and see if anything is better. The PC has two Display Port sockets, and while I haven't got room on my desk, I may see how a dual monitor set up feels.

  Installing Linux Mint 20, a long term support edition, did not take long, and the computer was basically usable in little more than 20 minutes, but I do like to customise my PC. Some of the customisation was recorded in the hidden files on my home directory, and just needed activating. Some customisation was installing some programs that are not part of the standard installation. That was easy for all but a couple of applications. My favourite TV watching program Me-TV can't be used on this latest version of Linux Mint, and there is no easy way around it. Fortunately I can use another program, and learn to love it.

  Another program has been depreciated from Linux Mint, and that is Chromium - the open source version of Google's "Chrome web browser". I particularly wanted to use that for access to a particular social media website. Fortunately the Linux Mint webpages describe several ways around this problem, and it was easy to get it up and running.  All these, and more, little tweaks were all fairly quick individually, but it took all afternoon before I was ready to take out my old PC, and put the new one in it's place.

  With it connected to it's proper monitor, a 23" widescreen monitor, and the speakers connected, I gave it a quick workout, and found it very good. One annoyance was The Gimp, my photo editing application, had a dark theme turned on as default. It didn't take long to go into Settings, and set it back to the old interface. I was also able to reset the tool options back to their normal size. For some reason they were really tiny beforehand. I think I should have restarted the program after fiddling with the settings because it seemed to semi crash on me when I closed it down. I hope that it will be happy when I come to use it for the first time.

  I was rather pleased with my new PC (apart from a few passing niggles) and felt like rewarding myself with some extra tasty dinner. I made a bit order of Indian food - enough for 3 or 4 days (depending on how hungry I am). Last night's dinner was probably not very healthy...on the other hand, I have seemingly got away with no negative effects after eating a lamb biriyani before. Maybe not this time though.... (Or maybe I shouldn't have had a bar of caramel chocolate - always a killer - for dessert).

  I managed to watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on the new PC, but the different interface of a different program sort of annoyed me. I have to learn to blank it out. After that I decided I would give the new set up a really good work out. I made a new backup of my home directory on my second home directory external back up disk. With that external drive connected to a USB 3 port it really flew - at first ! It seemed like it would only take a few hours to complete, but it soon became slower and slower.

  I think the problem was that the little 2.5", laptop sized, 2TB drive I am using for my home directory was not up to such intensive use, dishing out file after file non stop. It probably warmed up, and slowed down to stop it getting too hot. Somehow it managed to slow the computer down a lot too. Changing desktop windows usually happens in the blink of an eye, even on my old, slower PC, but last night it was taking several seconds. Oddly enough, one viewing the right window, anything done there seemed fast enough.

  It was fortunate that bedtime was so close so I could leave the PC to get on backing up the home directory by itself. It finished at around 8am this morning. That was a lot slower than expected, but still a lot faster than when I was copying the home directory on the old PC.  I read in bed until about 10pm, and I was asleep very soon after that. My sleep felt a bit lumpy, and although I can't recall enough details to try and describe my dreams, I know I dreamed a lot during the night.

  This morning I felt good and bad - probably pretty normal these days. The good is that I went to the toilet quite normally this morning. The bad was that even after that it seemed that my weight is drifting upwards again. Sooner or later I am going to have to force myself to go on some long walks, but not on a grey and wet day like today. Even worse still was my blood glucose. That stupid caramel chocolate bar sent it up to the danger level, 10.0mmol/l. Yesterday it seemed good, and now it seems awful.

  In theory it should be raining any minute now, but while the sky is very grey, it doesn't look like rain just yet. In fact the latest revision to the forecast says there is only a 10% chance of rain now, but that goes up to a more credible 50% chance in an hours time. I really don't fancy walking in the cold rain, and at just 9° C, it will be cold ! So today I stay in again. If nothing else it give me a chance to try the new PC for one of the reasons I felt the need to upgrade - video editing. My old PC may have had some faulty memory, and the video editing program would often crash on me. Fortunately, this being Linux, and not Windows, the rest of the PC would carry on as if nothing had happened, and fortunately I got into the habit of frequently saving my video editing so it was easy to restart from where I left off. I hope that now I will be able edit some very big files, and render them far faster than the old PC. I shall find out later today.