No matter how often the forecast for today is revised, it still comes out to roughly rain followed by more rain. At the moment the latest revision says there should be heavy rain, but it actually looks like it may have stopped raining. However the road is wet, and the puddles look deep. The sky is dark grey and depressing, and while the clouds may get lighter in colour for some time in the afternoon, they will still leak rain on us. Today is going to be wet. Maybe there will be less rain than what is hopefully a pessimistic forecast, but there will still be rain throughout the day. The temperature today - not just the afternoon, but the whole day, is, and will be 14° C. Tomorrow may be a degree or two cooler, and the sky a bit lighter in colour, but rainfall is predicted for the whole day again. Monday may be dry, and it may be cloudy all day. The most up to date prediction, which is no better than a guess, say we might have to wait until next Thursday until we see the sun again.

   Yesterday was not a day of great triumphs, but there was one, and it became apparent in the morning. You may recall that on Thursday afternoon I had a potentially disastrous accident involved plain water being poured over my mini laptop. As I said yesterday, I quickly disconnected the external power, and removed the battery before shaking out as much water as possible. Then I resisted touching it again until it had a chance to dry out overnight. Yesterday morning it booted up first time without a glitch.
  My little "netbook" - an Acer Aspire One with it's small 8 inch screen.  Once upon a time these, and similar mini laptops were dubbed netbooks because they were thought to be good for reading web pages. Sadly that is no longer true. Most web pages are so cluttered with scripts  to track you, and to display adverts, that they are so obese you need a super computer to display them. My netbook still displays my (these) webpages perfectly because I do not use any scripts. It is all "flat" html.

  Incidently, that may look like a Windows XP desktop, but it isn't. It is actually a Linux Mint XFCE desktop skinned to make it like Windows XP. I could have shown a genuine Windows XP desktop because this mini laptop is triple boot. On start up I can select one of three operating systems to use. Linux Mint is the default, and the other two choices are Windows XP, or the original Linpus operating system that the device was originally supplied with.

 Most of my day revolved around waiting for my latest booze order to be delivered. I am sure I have mentioned it many times before that the Stout cask matured Jameson that I bought two bottles of was not exactly what I wanted. It was very nice, but what I remembered from sometime last year was a bottle with a green label. It was probably the Jameson matured in IPA casks...but maybe not.

  I think it was around 3pm when my delivery arrived. I had intended to buy 2 bottles of Jameson, IPA edition, but it was limited to one per customer. To meet the £20 point where postage was free, I also ordered a bottle of Paddy, another Irish whiskey. I seem to find Irish whiskeys to be smoother than many Scotch whiskys. Scotch whisky is often too peaty (hints of burning tyres), and the single malt versions can be stupidly expensive, and taste too raw for my palate.

  I think I only waited 10 minutes after my new booze arrived before cracking open the bottles, and pouring a small shot glass of each. The Jameson was very nice, but it still didn't have that elusive "something" that I can remember tickling the pleasure centre of my brain so effectively. I am now at a loss to remember what that was, and what other special edition Jameson it might be. The Paddy whiskey was nice and smooth, and slipped down very easily ! None of these recently acquired whiskeys are as cheap as Tesco Special Reserve whisky (my favourite), but were all on special offer, and cheaper than most whiskies from Tesco. I reckon it was money well spent.

  Another diversion for yesterday was transferring yet more camcorder video to my PC. Doing that was simple enough - particularly when this time it was from a digital camcorder, and could be transferred digitally without having to go through the video capture box. It all started when I found a forgotten tape in my semi-pro Sony camcorder. It was footage shot at Party In The Priory in 2012.

  I know I have used a bit of that video, but there was quite a lot that was very usable, and yet I appear to have never done anything with it. The ironic thing was that when trying to find the date of the recording I found I had already transferred all the video over ages, and ages ago, but had still not used most of it.

  I think I have made a fundamental mistake. I have now transferred so much video to my computer that I am now spoilt for choices of what to start editing. It now feels like I am choking on raw video waiting to be used. The trouble is that I do not feel as creative as I once was. I transferred all the new video when I have only edited the first minute of the video I am supposed to be putting together of the ride on the Docklands Light Railway on the opening day of The Beckton Extension. The raw footage is boring, and it is going to take a lot of enthusiasm to prune it right down to make it more interesting, and yet I can bring myself to get stuck into it.

  It turns out that I did have one big success yesterday, although it probably came at a price. After my very high blood glucose reading yesterday morning I was determined to try and bring it down for today. That meant denying myself some pleasure, and being very careful with what I ate. I set out to do what I used to do very easily when I was at work - fast until I came home after work, and had my dinner. It wasn't so easy yesterday.

  It seems counter intuitive, but my excess dinner on Thursday, that filled me to bloating point, left me feeling very hungry yesterday morning. By 11am my stomach was really growling. I resolved to satisfy it with nothing more than plain rice crackers. I ended up eating most of a pack, but it did the trick, and my eating was very moderate after that - even my dinner was close to moderate. The penalty for eating all those rice crackers would seem to be constipation this morning !

  My dinner was a two part affair. Part one was some grilled lamb chops. They had been in the fridge for some time, and needed using up. I ate them with no accompaniment. Part two was a Aldi lamb rogan ghosh ready meal. It seems that Aldi have altered the recipes to use less fat in their ready meals, and so that curry was not so delicious as it would have been once when more oil was used in the recipe. It was still nice, and would seem to have been quite healthy in at least one respect, but it also made me question whether I will buy any more in the future.

  Later on, while watching TV, I had a couple of apples - one sweet one, and one that was supposed to be a Coxes apple, but seemed more like a Braeburn to me. I watched quite a bit of TV last night. I can't say the last thing I saw was fascinating, but it was sort of interesting. It was one of a series of programs featuring Brian Johnson of AC/DC fame, meeting some of his fellow musicians. Last night's episode, the only one I have watched until now, featured Lars Ulrich from Metallica. Both of them were from stadium filling bands, and they had shared quite a few stages in the past. It passed an hour (or was it just 30 minutes ?) quite pleasantly.

  I was in bed by 10pm, but I wasn't ready for  sleep, and so I started reading. It was lucky I wasn't ready for sleep because I had a call from a drunk Lee asking me a question about a song that he could have easily looked up on Google. Apparently, using Google would be "cheating", but asking me the same question somehow wasn't cheating ! I got rid of Lee after about 10 minutes, and I was soon immersed in my book again. That was when Aleemah sent me a text message.

  It is very unusual for Aleemah to text me so late, and even when she does text me it is usually to say she has been banned from Facebook again, or something. Last night's message was very different. It was the URL for a porn film. I gather she was watching it, and felt it was very erotic. I suspect she had either been drinking, which I believe she does now, or had consumed some dodgy drugs or something. I may try and find out what was going on sometime today.

   It was very late when I fell asleep. i think it was after midnight, but once asleep I seemed to sleep quite well. It wasn't perfect sleep. I woke up a few times for a pee, and on one occasion it seemed to take a while before I fell asleep again. The worst time was at about 6am. I think I had difficulty getting back to sleep then because it could have been time to get up. Eventually I fell asleep again (it may have only taken 10 minutes, but felt longer), and I then slept until 8am - which is quite late for me.

  This morning, apart from mild constipation, that feels like it could resolve soon, I sort of feel OK again. I am wondering if I did have some sort of bug a few days ago. I blamed it on the weather, but the weather today is, and will be awful, and I don't feel that bad. Like yesterday, my blood pressure is back to it's very low after a few days where I had to really relax to get it down to a pressure I thought was OK. The best thing is my blood glucose level. This morning it is very good. It was just 7.1mmol/l. That is quite a drop from 9.1mmol/l yesterday. It proves that I can do it when I need to - I just find it hard to deprive myself of the things I like - doubly so on a grey and wet day !

  Today is a grey and wet day, and both those things should really have been prefixed with "very" ! If I could raise the enthusiasm it would be a great day for ignoring the outside world, and getting on with that video editing. Maybe I will, or maybe I won't. Although I feel generally OK it would be more true to say nothing much aches or grinds, or....well, the usual stuff, but that doesn't mean I feel like running a marathon. I do feel like laying on my bed reading, and snoozing when it feels good, but I hope I can be a bit more constructive today.