It was most definitely raining hard at around 7am this morning. I could hear the rain beating at my bedroom windows. Since that it has started to dry up, and there has been a lot of bright sunshine from a sky that looks very dark in some directions. The sky looks semi clear to the north, and almost dark grey to the south west. The south east is sort of a bit variable. It seems that a division of the weather is passing right over my house, and the weather outside my front door could be completely different to the weather outside my back door. This complicates things !

  The BBC (Meteogroup) forecast predicts rain until morning, and overcast from then until nearly sunset. I can imagine that is true to the south of here. The latest Met Office forecast predicts it to be more lightly overcast until about 3pm, but with a 30% chance of a shower at 1pm. It also says that the last two hours of daylight will feature sunny spells. The BBC version says that the last hour before sunset will be sunny. Both forecasts say the day started at around 8° C, and will peak in the afternoon at just a rather cool 10° C. Tomorrow is likely to start almost cold enough for a frost, but clear skies will make it a very sunny day (for the meagre hours of daylight we no get), and that sunshine could raise the temperature to very slightly more than today, or 11° C.

   I didn't realise it at a conscious level, but maybe going shopping in Aldi, and ordering my next repeat prescription from the pharmacy, seemed to be enough for one day. I found that all my enthusiasm, if indeed I started with any, had drained away by mid morning. Maybe it was the contrast between the sunny spells and the heavy, or semi heavy showers that did something or another. I am pretty certain that the showers made me think how good it would be to stay indoors. Once again I did no exercise.

  In the grand scheme of things I would have to say what I did in the kitchen was my most valuable contribution to....err...my life ? I probably mean that it gave the greatest satisfaction. I gave the microwave oven a good internal scrub. It wasn't until I looked a lot closer that I found a few mouse droppings amongst some splattered food in there. I prefer to leave the microwave door open when it isn't being used. It helps it dry out, and that helps stop rust. Until that little furry monster succumbs to one of my traps I will have to keep that door shut !

  The other bit of scrubbing I did in the kitchen was of the paintwork of the lower half of the sash window that is partly behind the kitchen sink. On very rare occasions I do wash the glass (although the only view is that of a plain brick wall), but I can't remember the last time I washed/scrubbed the paintwork. It looks a lot brighter, and sort of clean now !

  The one other thing that I managed to raise a tiny bit of enthusiasm for was playing with the old Pentium 4 PC. I as good as proved that the SATA controller (and maybe the IDE) controllers were both not working properly. I fitted a PCI SATA controller card, and the machine started up OK with both the DVD drive, and hard disk connected to the SATA controller card. There was still something a bit funny about the hard disk, but I did managed to boot into Linux Mint 19.2 from a bootable DVD disk.

  Having seen it running Linux Mint I lost interest in it. I should have persevered and sorted out the Hard Disk problem, but I found I just could not be bothered. It seemed to be enough that I had made some useful progress, and that was enough for the day. I spent a lot of the rest of the day just reading. One other thing I did was to rip more promo CDs to mp3 files. I don't have a CD player set up and working at home, and so the easiest way of listening to the these CDs is on my PC from mp3 files. Most of these promo CDs came with an info sheet, and they paint most of the bands as being "the next big thing". In reality, the vast majority are crap. That does allow for maybe a few of them being not so crap. It is my ambition to try to listen to most of these disks to try and retain any that are better than awful before disposing of the rest.

 I was late getting to sleep last night because I decided I might as well finish the book I was reading. If I have one complaint it was that the end seemed rushed. I really must check, but I think I have checked, and Harry Harrison, the author, was probably quite ill when he was writing the book. He died in 2012, two years after the copyright date of the book "The Stainless Steel Rat Returns", his last ever book. I guess the rushed ending can be forgiven.

  I think I had a pretty fair sleep last night. I did have the usual trouble getting back to sleep after getting up for a wee sometime between 1 and 2am, but last night I was only awake for 10 to 15 minutes. I probably have one complaint about my sleep, and that is my dreams. I can't really remember much about any of them except for a few scraps of one of them, but they did all seem to leave a sort of impression that they were very unexciting. They were probably too much like real life - mostly boring now we are in the grip of Autumn during another Covid-19 lockdown (It actually starts on Thursday, but it doesn't seem any different to me).

  One dream in particular was very annoying. It was almost like a half page of background details during a novel. I was about to say "I was", but on reflection I wasn't anything except the equivalent to a TV viewer. I could see the action, what little there was of it, but was not part of it. The scene had the characteristics of the book I had been reading - futuristic with improbable technology.  The actual story line was to do with retrieving some porn that had been dumped in a lake using a futuristic submersible craft.

  Well, it seemed to have some sort of promise, but in the few seconds that it lasted I could see the porn on the lake bed. It seemed to look a lot like computer icons. The idea was to take extra high resolution pictures of the pictures using some fantastic camera system. The originals could be left where they were. The videos were going to be retrieved by robotic grappling arms. The thing that made the dream so boring is that nothing actually happened, and worse still, I didn't even get to see the porn !

  This morning I feel very variable. When the sun comes out I start to feel enthusiastic, but when it goes in again I feel sort of miserable, and notice every ache and pain. Once again I have steered clear of the scales, but I have checked my temperature, and my blood glucose. My temperature was slightly lower than usual at just 34.9° C - definitely no fever this morning ! My blood glucose is a slight mystery. I first check a tiny sample of blood from the little finger of my right hand. That gave a figure of 9.8mmol/l. That is very high, and seemed wrong.

  It is possible that there was some contamination on the little finger, and I only just managed to squeeze enough blood out to trigger the meter. I then tried again using the second finger on my left hand. That gave much more blood, and the measurement said 8.9mmol/l. It was still too high, but at least in a more sane area. I was expecting it to be a bit high because the Persimmon fruit I ate yesterday seemed very sweet and sticky. Whether that accounts for all the rise is unknown, but at least it is an excuse for now.


  When the sky looks like it did at 9.30am, looking north in the top picture, and to the south west in the lower picture, I feel zero inclination to go out - probably a negative inclination to go out. The trouble is that as I type these very words the sun is out again. I feel as confused as a schizophrenic ! Actually I think I am still biassed to the idea of not going out still.  Quite what I will do today is something I will just have to make up as the hours pass by.