It is starting to brighten up now, and there has been one very short sunny spell (30 seconds worth !), and this morning has started off a whole one degree warmer than the best that yesterday could offer. The most recent revision to the forecast looks almost identical to the screenshot above. It seems more and more likely that it will be a bright and pleasant afternoon. It is a shame the temperature may only be 12° C at best, but even that might feel OK in direct sunshine. Tomorrow could be a degree warmer still, but it comes at the cost of gloomy skies, and almost certainly some rain.

  My day was impeded yesterday because I felt ill. It is not easy to describe just exactly how I felt ill. There were some physical symptoms, and they were generally similar to how you might describe 'flu in it's milder forms. It wasn't 'flu though, and I don't think it was covid either. If anything it was a cross between fatigue and malaise. Some may well have been the after effects of my fairly long walk the day before. When I was doing such walks, or even longer walk, on a more regular basis, I would only get a few mild after effects the next day - quite often none at all.

  However, I do remember feeling rough the next day when I first started to try and do 5 mile walks on a more regular basis. Since summer ended I have put on weight, and have not been out for many walks. It feels a bit like I have to push myself a lot more when I go for what are now very occasional walks. I think this partly explains why the walk the day before yesterday left a legacy yesterday. Then, a few too many aches and pains, left me feeling miserable, and that just made it all so much more worse.

  What I do know is that I had no fever yesterday, and my blood glucose was good enough. I did note that my blood pressure was a bit higher than normal, but still well within the safe area. That suggests something was up, but blood pressure is probably more sensitive to emotion than anything else. All this preamble leads up to the act that I didn't feel like/couldn't be bothered to do anything yesterday. In theory I should have gone for a walk when the sun was out, and in theory I could have enjoyed that, but I preferred to do nothing.

  One thing I am forgetting at this point was that I did have two nights of insufficient sleep before yesterday. They would have taken their toll too. In fact I think that yesterday I even mentioned that I fancied a bit more sleep. I did have an extra snooze yesterday morning, and maybe it contributed to some of the creakiness I experienced I felt until ate in the afternoon.

  While I keep thinking I was entirely unproductive yesterday, it is only half true. I shouldn't lose sight of the fact that I was up early, after a late night, to go shopping in Aldi. I then had to stay alert for a parcel delivery - a very heavy parcel that probably broke the camels back when I lugged it from the front door to the dining room to unpack it. I probably deserved a snooze after that.

  It could be argued that I did very little in the afternoon because my old PC did most of the work, but the fact is that I did feed it with stuff to work on. Yesterday was the first time I selected it to boot into Windows XP since I repaired it after it's blow up. Windows was oblivious to the changes I had made to add a solid state hard drive because that, being formatted to a Linux file system, was invisible to it. Windows was a bit surprised to find a new graphics card in it, but it was part of the same ATI family, and just needed a small tweak to set the resolution correctly. (I was also using it on a different, and 4:3 monitor as well).

  Once Windows had settled down I installed the software for the video capture/converter box I bought not so long ago, and then I got out a VHS machine to try with it. Then I got to the point where I did very little, and the computer worked hard. I ended up transferring  2 small videos, and three long videos onto the PC. The long videos were three "episodes" of Raw Power - a late night rock music programme on ITV in 1991.

  There was no special reason for wanting digital copies of those Raw Power "episodes". (I don't think "episodes" is the right description for this sort of thing, but I can think of no better description). In one respect there was a reason not to digitise them, and that was because the sound quality was really quite bad. At first I thought the muffled sound was a fault of the recorder, but later on I realised that the sound during the commercial breaks sounded OK (apart from the annoying processing they do to commercials to make them stand out). I ended up coming away with the idea that the crap sound was due to cheap and crap production of the programmes themselves - made to a cheap budget as a late night filler.

  In all I transferred over three hours of VHS, analogue video to my PC. I even made a start of editing some of it. I cleaned up the beginning and end, and removed the commercial breaks from on Raw Power, and I cleaned the end and beginning of the two short videos, as well as making copies in a better file format to show here.