Today I thought it was extra prudent to check for the latest forecast revision before commenting on it. Reality and the forecast still have some differences of opinion about what should be happening. I walked to Aldi at about 8.30am. It was quite grey, but drying up after some rain earlier in the night. I finished my shopping half an hour later, and emerged from the supermarket into bright sunshine, and huge puddles ! There had obviously been a quite torrential downpour while I was inside. As I walked home the sunshine felt very hot, and that was on top of it being a slightly warm morning - a pleasant 17° C. Since then there has been more sunshine, and several showers. The last one seemed quite heavy, and the look of the sky suggests there is plenty more to come. The latest revision to the forecast still says there will be some sunny intervals, and even some sunshine this afternoon.

  As I look out the window I find the idea of sunshine this afternoon very unlikely, but with a keen wind blowing the clouds all over the place, I guess anything could happen. One thing seems certain, and that is that even now, when by tradition it should be warming up, it is actually starting to cool down. Tomorrow morning is currently forecast to start a lot colder than today, and the afternoon temperature may only reach 10° C. Tomorrow may start wet, but a few sunny spells may be possible in the afternoon.

   As I mentioned in my waffle about the weather yesterday,  I abandoned any ideas about going out as soon as the un-forecast heavy shower happened at 11.30am. That meant I had to find other stuff to do. I spent about 15 minutes doing some housework (mainly so washing up, and cleaning the kitchen work surfaces) and then got bored of doing that. I did give some consideration to going into my garden, and maybe digging up my last crop of potatoes, but grey skies and the inevitable mud out me off doing that.

  I decided to let my mind float for a while, quite a long while, while engrossed in some reading. I might have even had a short snooze. Eventually I decided that I would have a play with another old PC. The one I had in mind was the motherboard from an Acer SA80 desktop computer mounted in an old Compaq computer case. It was rather long in the tooth, but I knew it had a 3GHz Pentium 4 processor in it, and so it should have been usable.

  Before doing anything else I wanted to replace a capacitor with a bulging top. With that done I started to almost build the computer from scratch. The only thing left unchanged was the processor and it's heatsink and fan. I don't know if i had some sort of unconscious premonition about how this task would end up, but I had decided I wouldn't waste time replacing the heatsink compound on the processor until it was all working OK - which as I write this, it isn't !

  After screwing the motherboard into the case I connected up the front panel stuff, the hard drive, the DVD drive, and the power supply. It was time for the big switch on. It started to work, but got stuck in the BIOS screen. One of the first things I did was to check the BIOS backup battery. It was as dead as a dodo. I replaced, and that seemed to make things worse. It came up with an ACER graphical BIOS screen, and just stuck there. After playing it with it for some time, and getting nowhere, I gave up, and decided to sort some dinner out.

Interlude: I've just spent over half an hour, maybe even close to an hour, playing with that computer again. I had a few ideas.... I'll describe what happened at the end of today's diary (or blog, or whatever this is).

  Yesterday's lunch was instant pasta pots, and they were not great. Maybe not even nice, but having made them up, I dutifully ate them. (I still have another 5 to get through some time). When it came to dinner I could have, and should have cooked up something with some semblance to being healthy, but I found I didn't have the patience. I heated up a can of "Irish Stew". It was neither good nor bad. For Dessert I opened up a can of mild chicken curry that I converted to hot chicken curry by adding hot pepper sauce. That too was unexciting, and not really much better than the Irish stew.

  My evening was not terribly exciting. I found a few crap TV programmes to watch, but I had retired to bed with a book by 9pm (or was it a bit later ?). By 11pm I was fast asleep, and I slept well until 1am. At 1am I had to get up for a wee. When I went back to bed I felt too hot under the duvet, and I still mostly felt slightly warm without it. Compared with recently, it was a warm night, but I am not sure it was warm enough to feel too hot in bed. I'm not sure what was going on. It was probably everyone's favourite scapegoat Covid-19.

  It too two hours before I started sleep again. During that time I spent 10 - 20 minutes on my PC. While doing so I checked my body temperature. It was perfectly normal (for me) - around 35.8° C if I recall correctly. Eventually I fell asleep, and although I seemed to be dreaming a lot, I basically slept OK until just gone 7am. Ideally I would have turned over, and gone back to sleep, but I had stuff to do !

  As I said at the very top of the page, I went shopping in Aldi just after 8.30am. It was nice and quiet in there. I think some had been put off going out by the threat of rain in the forecast, but that was the forecast made the previous day. Today the rain seems to have come in short, sharp showers. As I write this the sun is....err, was, blazing down (it's just gone in again), and yet the road is all wet from another recent shower. The latest update to the forecast says it should be overcast right now, but once again the sun has come out !

  This morning I think I detected a small drop in my weight. This was not surprising after my visit to the toilet. I made a very generous deposit today !  My blood glucose has dropped a little too. It was 8.0mmol/l compared to 8.3mmol/l yesterday morning. Tomorrow it may be up again because I have just enjoyed a couple of very sweet persimmon fruits ! Walking to Aldi (and back) was a good way of assessing how I was feeling this morning, and the answer was still "I don't know".

  I guess it was an easy walk to Aldi, and not too bad coming back with a lot of heavy shopping, but I can't say I felt good enough to enjoy it. I think I am missing a few hours of sleep after my period of insomnia last night. When I got home I did one more important thing. I phoned the pharmacy to order my next repeat prescription. It wasn't quite that easy. I probably phoned a bit too early the first time. I got a recorded message to say don't leave a message when it invites you to leave a message ! I got through half an hour later on my second attempt, and my prescription should be ready to pick up on Wednesday.

  I meant to show this small picture yesterday, but forgot. It may look like a 2nd class stamp, but it is actually printed on the envelope that some spam from Sun Life Assurance (assuring you are pissed off with junk mail) came in. In the dim grey light filtering through my windows on Saturday I was taken in by the picture, and thought it was a real stamp, but then I couldn't feel the edge of it. I presume that Sun Life have special permission to use what would otherwise by a forgery - and using he Queens image without permission could get their heads cut off !

  I got side tracked while writing this. I wondered if the old PC I was playing with yesterday was having trouble because I couldn't handle a very large hard drive. I left writing to go and play with it some more. When I disconnected the 750GB hard drive I was able to get into the BIOS, and even to try and boot from a live Linux DVD. That didn't work, and now I am wondering if the SATA controller chip has been damaged. I have a vague recollection of a power supply blow up in the original computer. Such a things could have caused more damage.

  I was going to go out today on the promise of it being sunny, but while it is still sunny as I write this, I find myself not trusting the forecast because reality seems to be taking the weather down a different path. I must admit the sky does look nice at the moment. I am now torn three ways. I think the mostly likely thing I'll be doing next is seeing if I can catch up with an hour or so of lost sleep. That probably would only work mid afternoon, and so I have to choose between coaxing that old PC to life, or going for a walk. I have to admit that the battle between me and that PC is rather attractive right now.