We start November with no sunshine, and more rain. It was raining earlier, and the way the road looks very damp at the moment suggests there could still be some fine, misty drizzle. The very best we can hope for today is a very mild, 17° C, early evening, but there is a 50% chance of that "warmth" being accompanied by non stop light rain. Once again I have written what the old forecast said without checking for later revisions. The forecast has been revised, and the only small change is that there now seems to be a possibility of a few sunny spells in the early afternoon. Tomorrow, a bit like today, is forecast to start warm and wet, but as the clouds fade away the temperature will drop, but there could be some nice sunny spells in the afternoon.

   Yesterday was another day that not a lot seemed to happen, but I did manage to be a bit productive. One of the first useful things I did was to do some laundry - just a couple of t-shirts, some underwear, and a couple of pairs of "lounge pants". There was obviously no way to dry it all outdoors, and so I hung it all on the clothes horse with a fan heater set on low blowing on it. That had the happy side effect of getting the dining room a more comfortable temperature.

  I'm not sure what I did next was actually constructive, or at this point in time, just conceit. I set about overhauling my previous main PC. I wanted to check the memory in it, and see if I had any other memory sticks I could use in it. I sort of did. I had ordered some bigger memory for my mini PC, and it was of the exact same type as the motherboard of my previous PC used. However, what I had here from the first part of that order (I think part 2 of the order is probably coming from China, and won't be here until later in the month) is exactly the same size as what is already in the PC.

  One thing I did while I had the memory (RAM) sticks out was to clean their gold plated connections. It was only recently, while playing with the mini PC, that I discovered an excellent way of cleaning those edge connectors. A beer mat with Isopropanol Alcohol sprayed along the edge works really well. It is very, very slightly abrasive to light contamination, but not abrasive enough to rub away the gold plating. It cured a problem of one memory stick not working in the mini PC.

  While inspecting the motherboard of my previous PC I noticed three capacitors with bulging tops. They were the most likely the cause of some instability that PC had. There is not an inch of space to work on anything in my old workshop, and so I had to work on the dining room table to replace those capacitors. That was one of my work skills that is still easy to do, and more importantly, possible to do without using specialist equipment (such a stereo microscope for microscopic surface mount components).

  Apart from accidently swapping over the two hard disks in that PC, and having to reconnect them correctly before it would boot up, it booted up first time, and somehow seemed to be more solid. I didn't try to run any programs, but seeing the desktop was good enough. I then rebooted, and at the boot menu I selected Memtest 86 - a stand alone memory testing application.
  I left it running overnight, and by this morning, almost 14 hours later, it had completed 10 passes of quite a thorough test program, and there were no errors found. I think I can declare that PC to be in 100% working order, by which I mean the hardware. The main operating system, Linux Mint 17.3, is both out of date, and has accumulated some errors over the last 4 years or so. I shall probably retain the secondary installation of Windows XP on it (there are a couple of programs on it that are not available for Linux), but I will install the latest version of Linux Mint on it (version 20). All I have to do them is to wonder what I shall use it for !

  I am very aware that I have not been eating wisely recently....maybe a bit longer than recently. In fact probably for most of last month. I had a couple of Pot Noodles for lunch, and as well as being crap, they are loaded with all sorts of things that are bad for me. Quite why they need such huge amounts of saturated fat is a mystery (other instant noodles don't have nearly as much), and all that fat contains far too many calories. If they have any positive thing then it is to scare me to try and eat more healthily for a few hours until the scare fades away.

  My dinner was a lot better. It was a fairly fat free grilled steak. It did have some fat, and steak needs fat to have a proper steak flavour. I had that steak with grilled tomatoes and mange tout. The only thing that very slightly spoiled the experience was putting the tomatoes in with the steak in the grill a bit too late. Those tomatoes were nice, but would have been nice still if the skins were just starting to char.

  As nice as that dinner was, I still couldn't throw off the bad habit I seemed to have acquired - that of having a dessert. I think it is boredom and depression from these dark went days. Last night I had a bar of carefully selected dark chocolate - selected to have a low sugar content. I might have done better to get a low sugar/calorie ice cream out of the freezer, but it would have been even better to have nothing.

  Last night I did have a short glitch in my sleep, but I was probably only awake for 15 minutes. Other than that I seemed to sleep solidly...or maybe not. I have this idea, right or wrong, that if I remember dreaming a lot, even if I don't really remember the content of the dreams, it is an indication that I was not sleeping very deeply. I do remember dreaming a lot , but I can't honestly say what "a lot" actually is when I can't remember much of those dreams. Maybe those dreams lasted mere seconds.

  This morning I have mixed ideas about how I feel. It is a Sunday, and I have apparently not waited until at least halfway through the day to conclude that it is boring, and therefore I am depressed. I think I feel better physically than I do mentally. The mental aspect was not gifted any relief when I got on the scales soon after getting up. It would appear that a few months work to lose weight very successfully has been undone in little more than a week !  There is some half better news. Despite not being all that careful about what I ate yesterday, I have started the month with my blood glucose at 8.3mmol/l. That is higher than I would like to start the month, but not terrible.

  I think I will probably get out for a walk today. I certainly need to ! The start of the afternoon may include a few sunny spells, and any rain shouldn't fall until tonight. I have few excuses not to go out, but while part of me thinks it is needs, the other half doesn't feel so keen about it. It is almost 11am, and I haven't even had a wash yet. I guess I'll see how I feel after a shower.