The latest revision to the forecast has reduced the hours when it will be overcast, and substituted "cloudy" for some hours. That means this afternoon will only feature light gloom now instead of dark gloom. Apart from this afternoon, when it will be less, there is only a 10% chance of rain at any other time today. The chances are that it will stay dry. Today has started a lot milder than yesterday, and the afternoon should see 12° C. It will still be 12° C just after midnight tonight, but tomorrow will gradually get cooler through the day until it ends at about 8° C. The whole day will be cloudy without a peep of the sun, but once again the highest chance of rain will be no more than 10% - unless things change before then, which is quite likely.

   Yesterday was a very bland day. Yet another day when my get up and go got up and went without me ! I did do some laundry (as ever, by hand), and so I can claim that as something productive. I eventually did some work on my old PC, and it is almost ready for use. I still need to do a lot of customisation to the user interface to get it looking like I want it to (like Windows XP, or Windows 2000 would do at a pinch). The most important thing will be to try and improve what is known as the "Start menu" on Windows. I am beginning to doubt that the KDE desktop was a wise choice now. It wouldn't take much to install an alternative desktop, but I will only do that if I fail to tame/domesticate the KDE desktop.

  I did one other thing yesterday, but it was destructive rather than constructive. I broke a chair. When I first moved here I was offered a dining room table and chairs by my friend Ivor. He wanted to get rid of it because he had also moved, and his new wife wanted something different, and neither of them liked the chairs. They tend to tip backwards if you lean back to far, but worse than that is the welds that hold the seat to the frame. One broke beyond redemption, and it is rusting away in the garden awaiting some sort of disposal. All the others have required repairs, except one chair retained one original weld - until yesterday when that broke. I now need to make a strong metal strap to wrap around the frame, and attach it to the original support bar. It is an annoying job, but I can't put it off too long.

  The one other thing of note that I did yesterday was to eat carefully. I must confess that I didn't really know I had done so until I checked my blood glucose this morning, but more about that later.  I didn't eat many snacks yesterday, and one reason why I didn't was because I was cold. The explanation is not that I didn't want to "stoke up" with extra food, but that I warmed myself up with soup. It was no ordinary soup, but beef noodle soup from one of the packets I had bought from the little supermarket on Catford bridge.

  Most of the writing on the packet is either Eastern European, or Turkish, but there is a small section on English which says how to prepare it. It is no "cuppa-soup", and it has to be "cooked" by simmering for 5 minutes after being started off in boiling water.  With the help of a splash of hot pepper sauce, it was quite tasty, although it was little more than some beef stock with a handful of short and thin noodles in it. The thing is, the packet was to make up one litre of soup, and it wasn't easy to divide the packet to make less.

  I made, and drank a whole litre of the stuff. It was enjoyable, and it was quite filling, although being 95% hot water didn't stay filling for long....and yet it must have been because I can't really recall wanting to eat anything else until dinner time approached. As far as I could tell it had practically no sugar in it, and hardly any calories either. I really ought to eat/drink/use it more often - particularly on cold grey days !

  My dinner was a pretty healthy dinner. It was grilled/roast chicken thighs with part steamed brocolli and cauliflower. I did have some "no added sugar" biscuits afterwards. "No added sugar" is not as good as "sugar free", but evidently they were good enough. It make me wonder if Gullon, the company who makes those biscuits, might be changing their "Sugar Free" logo to "No Added Sugar" for technical reasons.

  Despite having a fairly lazy day, I was in bed, and after reading for a bit, asleep fairly early last night, although still not as early as I used to go to sleep. The main reason for this was because I watched an extra hour of TV again last night. There was a documentary about the making of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon" on the Sky Arts channel (thankfully a freeview channel, and I can conveniently forget that it is part of the hated Sky conglomerate). It was a very interesting documentary, and that was probably because I think it might have originally been made by the BBC.

  Once I turned out the light it didn't seen to take long to fall asleep. On the whole I slept well. I do seem to recall a series of dreams all with a common theme of repairing electronic stuff - mostly audio stuff if I recall correctly, although most of the details have evaporated now as happens to most dreams. The bit I do remember was that I was working with my friend Lee. I think he was trying to repair a simple amplifier. He declared it a write off because he could not find any fault, and that was he hadn't used any common sense or test equipment - which is very typical of his fault finding because he is an electrician, and they know very little about electricity ! I used no more than a simple multimeter, and diagnosed the fault in seconds !

  I think several more brief dreams were to a similar theme. For some unfathomable reason I seem to think I woke up feeling quite refreshed, and sort of OK-ish this morning. That was handy because I had plans for today. Before doing anything else except having a wee, I checked my health measurements (except my weight because I am a coward). Everything was good except for my blood glucose which was excellent. Somehow I had got it down to just 6.7mmo/l. If I can manage that for most of the rest of the days of this month I could get the average down to 7.5mmo/l at the end of the month. 7.5 is my self set target, and it gives a comfortable margin for safe living.

  I have to admit I possibly slept better than I wanted to - in as much as I slept later than I thought I might. My plan for today was to shower, get dressed, and go to the little, multi-ethnic, little supermarket on Catford bridge while it was still quiet in there. I got there later than intended, but the shop was still just about empty. I bought a few bottles of Diet Coke, some apples, some pears, and a few snack like things - and another couple of packets of weird soup like the beef noodle soup I had yesterday.

  Next on my plans for today is to finish writing my blog, this thing you are reading now, and then....and then I seem to have run out of ideas, or at least ideas that I might actually do. Repairing the broken chair ought to be done today, but I don't feel keen to go through all that bother at the moment. Another possibility, and one I did spent a few minutes making preparations for yesterday, is to go for a walk in the River Pool Linear Park with my waterproof camera, and a long pole with a camera mount attachment on it. I think a brighter day would be better for it, but I want to submerge the camera in some of deeper parts of the river to take some video of anything interesting down there. I think I will wait until there is more light for that, but I shall be doing it one day. I guess today I'll be back playing with my old PC again.