It is just typical. Today is going to be bright and sunny, mostly by sunny intervals, but there should be some very long periods of sunshine, and today, for reasons I'll explain soon, I can't make good use of that sunshine. It will be no warmer than yesterday, but will appear warmer in the direct rays of the sun. It will be a dry day today, but probably not tomorrow. Rain is predicted tomorrow morning, but the afternoon may feature many sunny spells. It may still only reach 13° C again.

   Yesterday was a day when my get up and go, got up and went without me. I don't think I actually felt miserable, but I just couldn't find any motivation to do anything. I had to force myself to start a video editing project, but by dinner time I had made very little progress in it. I feels like I spent most of my time laying on my bed reading. There was one other confounding factor to this lack of activity.

  I think I felt that my spurt of activity in the morning was enough for the day...well, not entirely, but it didn't help. My morning activity included repairing my PC after it wouldn't start again after a reboot. I had to boot the PC from a live DVD, and do a file system check and repair before it would boot normally again. After that I could make little use of the PC for several hours while I made two back up copies of the possibly failing hard disk in the PC. Fortunately they were incremental backups, and were a lot faster to do than a backup from scratch. It helped that this new PC has much, much faster USB3 ports to connect the backup hard drives to.

  The other bit of my spurt of activity in the morning was to repair the flush mechanism of my toilet. It was a fairly quick, very simple job, but having to do it was an annoyance followed by a brief minor triumph when it was done. Of course it was crazy to think that I had done enough for the day at that point, but the influence of the thin grey light seeping in my windows from outside seemed to sap any thoughts of doing more. It sent signals to the primitive parts of my brain saying it was now time to hibernate.

  When I think back to yesterday morning I remember there was yet one more confounding factor that drained any enthusiasm. I had it in mind that I would start work on a grand video masterpiece, or a sort of video slapped together from wobbly shots that were not always looking in the right direction. I had also missed taking some important shots when I shot the video way back in 1994. Back in those early days actually being able to shoot video was a marvel in itself that seemed to over ride any thoughts of being "creative" or "semi-professional", or what ever description it is I am trying to say.

  The video itself is of a journey to Beckton Docklands Light Railway station on the first day that branch opened. Much of the video is of very long boring views taken between stations, and very little of the brand new intermediate stations themselves. It is going to take some serious editing to try and make what should be an historic event interesting.

  The extra confounding factor was that the video I transferred from my old Hi8 camcorder to my PC, using my new capture box, was stored as an incompatible file for the video editor I was to use. The capture program also has a video editor, and that can store the file in a compatible format. It was incredibly slow - it seemed like it was doing it in real time - but eventually I had the video in a compatible format.

  Fortunately many types of video transcoding can be done with no loss of quality, and that seemed to be the case here. Having got the video in the correct format I fired up the video editor, and started work, but it was mid afternoon before this happened. By 5pm I had actually read more pages of the book I was reading than minutes of video edited.

  In fact it was worse than that. It wasn't minutes completed, but mere tens of seconds ! I just was not in the right frame of mind to concentrate on the job at hand. To try and get something sort of watchable at the end is going to take a lot of concentration, and also some creativity that doesn't seem to exist when the outside world is battleship grey.

  By 5pm my thoughts had turned to dinner. There were many things I could have cooked for my dinner. My fridge is fairly well stocked at the moment, but I had an urge to have something special....something like a kebab. I ended up ordering a takeaway, and by 6.30pm, halfway through watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Freeview "Pick" channel), my food arrived.

  As usual I had ordered more than I needed for one night, and I set aside a big portion for tonight.  After dinner I relaxed, and had a couple of nightcaps. One of which was a small glass of Hot Chocolate vodka (pictures on the left). It is really nice, but like so many very nice things, it has far too much sugar in it. Sugar is actually listed as an ingredient ! I would have loved a mug of the stuff before going to bed, but I could only allow myself a small glass - not much bigger than a large shot glass !


  It was similar to what happened a few days ago. I started sneezing, my nose felt blocked, and I was coughing too. After little more than a minute I was just left with a stuffy feeling nose. Although I describe my bedroom as being warm, I really only meant that in relative terms, and all the sneezing made me feel cold. I was also feeling like I had got up too early, and so I went back to bed. I slept lightly for the next hour.

  I know my sleep was light because I was still aware of the dustbin men clattering around now and then during that hour. When I woke up again it was like the previous time was just a dream. I seemed to feel completely different, except in one respect. I needed to go to the toilet again, and I spotted evidence in the bowl that my earlier visit was real, and not a dream. This second time I went back to my bedroom there was no coughing and sneezing.

  My temperature was it's usual early morning low 35.5° C, and to my great relief my blood glucose was down again to an OK 7.7mmol/l. I say that is OK, but I would really prefer it to be under 7.5. Even my blood pressure was back down after a recent small rise. My systolic pressure was just 116mmHg, and my diastolic pressure was 74mmHg. I guess I should feel pretty good, and I sort of do feel a bit better than some days.

  Feeling better could also be for two external reasons. The sun being out is always a big lift, and a bit of company, and a lot of beer, will make this afternoon enjoyable....up to a point. I don't think Michael will be dropping by for "Thursday club", but Jodie will definitely be dropping by with some weird and wonderful beers. My only complaint is that Jodie is not always sparkling company for long periods, and she will inevitably delay my dinner by staying late - again !