Today has started off cold enough for a frost, but will gradually warm up to 10° C if we are lucky. The latest revision to the forecast correctly changes the prediction to show a few weak sunny spells happening as I write this, or I should I say happening until I just wrote that. The sun is now behind a thick wall of cloud, and it seems unlikely it will break through that in a hurry. It seems there is at least a 50% chance of some light rain this afternoon. Overall it would seem to be a nasty day. Tomorrow may be slightly better. It is currently thought to be a couple of degrees less cold, and while no sunshine is predicted, it should be a brighter gloom !

   One of the odd things about yesterday was not unique to yesterday, but yesterday was a good example of how even a warm room can still feel cold when it is cold outside. It is probably a psychological thing rather than a real thing. Maybe it is a sort of resurfacing of childhood memories. In those days we had, or could only afford little heating. When it was cold outdoors it was cold indoors too. I can plainly remember frost on the inside of the windows. Of course when you are very young the cold doesn't get to you like it does now. All sorts of bits, mainly joints, ache when I feel too cold now.

  At the top of the page I said it probably rained around midday. I am not so sure that was the case now. It may have been the case that 24 hours earlier the weather forecast said there might be a couple of hours of sunny spells around midday, or it may have been that there was actually an hour or two of sunny spells then. Whatever the truth was, at some point I speculated that I might go out for a walk, and then later was glad that I didn't - maybe because of a shower or two.

  There was a bigger reason for not going out for a walk the supersedes any other - I was really late getting myself together. Instead of washing and dressing I edited some photos of views of The River Pool taken through the year, and sent them to Friends Of The River Pool where they had a small, but positive reaction. Once I had done that, but still before I had a shower, and got fully dressed, I tackled a little problem that I had been putting off.
  I had to deal with the mouse I had trapped. The images are a bit gruesome, but I thought I would record them. I was not using a so called humane trap, but then again I doubt it was that inhumane. Once sprung the bar comes down in milliseconds, and it has crushed the neck of the mouse (and flipped the trap upside down). I think, and hope, that death was almost instantaneous. I left the corpse on the tree stump in the garden where I expected a crow or magpie to make a quick meal of it, but it is still there this morning. I did see a couple of magpies this morning, but they seemed to be more interested in chasing each other. I expect something will help itself to this mousey snack sooner or later. Maybe even a fox.

  After putting the corpse outside I first did the washing up, left in the sink from the previous day, and then I went over the worktops with some Dettox impregnated cleaning cloths to remove any mouse dropping I could find. There was quite a pile behind a small pile of cans. I do wonder what it has been eating since I removed the bag of mixed nuts it had been eating a few or more months ago. The only thing I found nibbled after that was a sprig of broccoli ! This morning I didn't do a thorough search, but I could not see a single mouse dropping. It would be amazing if I only had one solitary mouse in my house, but that is how it seems to be for now.

  After having a very late shower, and getting dressed properly I spent a bit of time tidying up the dining room - mainly taking the computer of it that I had been working on. I only finished get the room clean and warm about half an hour before Jodie arrived for our beer drinking session. She had brought some beers with her that she had bought from The Star And Garter pub in Bromley - it is closed as a pub, but open as a sort of off licence.
  The beers Jodie brought over, plus a couple of Belgium beer glasses for later.  The can labels give the game away that these three beers were brewed in some hipster brewery. Unfortunately, in order to make themselves different from mainstream brewers they have invented some terrible recipes. All three beers used some pretty weird hops, several types of both barley and rye malts, and one of them had passion fruit pulp in it. All three seemed very sour, and I did not enjoy them.
  This was part of my contribution - Belgium beers. The beer on the right, Saison, is a style of a beer that us usually quite tart, but didn't taste very tart at all after those hipsterish beers. The best beer pictured here was the Pater 6 Abbey ale. Initially the thick taste can be a bit overpowering, but after a few small mouthfuls it starts to slip down far too easily !

  It was another long session, and Jodie did not leave until about 6.45pm to get the 6.58pm train back to Elmers End. Once again I had missed most of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I was OK to watch Star Trek: The New Generation while I ate my dinner. I ate my dinner in what I believe is the French style  - getting the vegetables over and done with before eating the meat. This was mainly because the meat, a couple of small minted lamb steaks, was not cooked well enough, and the booze gave me a raging hunger.

  My first course was baked potato with low sugar beans. It could have been a meal in itself....but maybe only with the addition of some cheese. By the time I had eaten it, and the next ad break came on, the lamb steaks were cooked enough, and I had them with the other half of the beans. It was not exactly a healthy dinner, but it was very nice. It, and the earlier booze, left me feeling very relaxed, and an hour later, at 9pm, I went to bed.

  Before turning the light out I read a page or two of another book I have started to read, but it felt like I was ready for sleep. It would turn out that I wasn't quite ready for sleep, and it probably took another 40 minutes before I fell asleep. From then on I seemed to sleep OK, but every time I woke up it increasingly felt like I was slowly developing a stomach ache. Some the beer we had drunk earlier was a bit fizzy, and I thought the stomach ache might be just a bit of trapped wind.
 
  I still seemed to get a fair sleep, but when I eventually got up it wasn't long before I had to visit the toilet, and i think the say is "the world dropped out my bottom". I felt much better for that, although a rather less dramatic visit half an hour later seemed to be a more complete cure. After that I could concentrate on feeling bad about all my aching joints. Probably the worst ache was from my left wrist and forearm. I suspect that it could be some legacy from where my nerves got crushed in my left elbow while I was on the operating table back in 2013. I rarely notice it now, but the small fingers on my left hand are still slightly numb to this day. It is a strange sort of numbness now, and maybe numb is the wrong word because I can feel stuff with those fingers, but it feels indescribably strange.

  Yesterday morning I was expecting my blood glucose to be a bit lower than it was. This morning I thought it may be a bit higher after the beer, and the two (small) baked potatoes I ate. It was ! It is not terribly high - at 8.8mmol/ it is still under 9, and 10 is the real danger area. Today I ought to make some effort to get it back down again, but on such a chilly day it is going to be very difficult. The level of difficulty will be raised if the sky starts getting darker as it is forecast to do. At the moment it is sort of bright grey outside, and while that doesn't raise any enthusiasm, at least it doesn't dampen any - at the moment !

  I have just had another long and rambling phone call from my friend Lee, and so most of the morning has gone now. I really don't know what I shall do for the rest of the day. I do think that the day will involve some hot soup, although by now the worst of the chill is over, and the latest revision to the forecast says it will soon be as much as 12° C outside. That is not that cold when the sun is out - which rules out today ! If I try hard I can probably raise the enthusiasm to do the work on improving my old PC that I seem to be doing in tiny increments. An hour or two of concentration could see the job finished....hmm, I'll see......