The forecast got he mist right this morning, although it is a very tenuous mist, and can really only be seen as a haze in the far distance. Just to make things rather strange, the latest revision to the forecast says that we should have just emerged from fog, but I was outdoors at the time, and all I saw was a misty haze in the distance. The latest revision omits any mention of rain, but does change many of the white clouds to grey clouds. After a chilly start the temperature should finally rise to about 10° C around sunset, although, of course, 10° C is still rather chilly. The weather changes a lot tomorrow. The clouds should disappear, and the day will be sunny. It will also be very cold with the afternoon struggling to reach 7° C.

 
  Yesterday was another day that could have been very dull and boring, and to a certain extent it did start that way (not counting my early shopping visit to the little supermarket on Catford Bridge). I spent a fair time just reading, and sort of waiting for the day to end. That didn't last that long, and I slowly started to do a few odd jobs here and there - just things lasting a few minutes with long gaps between them.

  Later, in the afternoon I did two other, rather more concrete things, or three is, as I guess it should, preparing the ingredients for me dinner - and cooking them. Sometime in the afternoon I set up my spare PC on the dining room table, and started to copy a couple of old VHS tapes onto the hard drive. The first tape was really a waste of time, but I did it anyway. It was a free promotional tape from WH Smith in 1988. It was basically a 60 minute advert for all the VHS tapes they were selling.

  I view that tape as a sort of historical item. It gives a sort of sense of what life was like in 1988 while surrounded by crap movies ! Curiously enough, some of the VHS tapes on offer were of rather old movies. One such movie was "The Young Ones" starring Cliff Richard. It featured the original cinema trailer for it that described it as the gayest film for years. In these days "gayest" is likely thought of as having a very different meaning.

  The second tape I copied was a trainspotter special - Video Track issue 51. Unfortunately the power strip I had the VHS player plugged into was rather poor quality, and one or two of the sockets are a bit loose. With a heavy load, like a fire, that could be very dangerous. That is why it was thrown out at work, and I reclaimed it for light work from the waste electrical stuff bin - always an interesting source of stuff. 58 minutes into the video the power glitched. Everything was OK again for the last 2 minutes when I used a different socket, but it meant I had an edit to do to stitch the two bits together again.

  The Windows program that the video capture box works with does have an edit function, but as far as I can see it can only top and tail a recording, and not stitch two segments together. I must admit I thought I had done that, but it didn't work. To make matters worse, when I tried to save what I thought was the edited version, it ended up as a gigantic 12GB file - which I thought was impossible on Windows XP.

  I rebooted into Linux, and used the Kdenlive video editor to do a clean splice between the two segments, and save it as a still rather large, 1.9GB, mp4 file. While it was rendering the video, always a slow process, I was downloading and installing the Xfce desktop and graphical user interface.  I was mistaken when I thought that the claims that the KDE desktop and graphical user interface had been hugely improved. After it all went disastrously wrong when it was "improved" 8 or more years ago I gave up on it as being a pile of crap. It has improved, but is still basically crap. It is currently on version 5. Version 1 was very good, and version 2 not bad. Version three was the biggest disaster of all time. Maybe it will take until version 7, in 4 or 5 years time, before it can be considered good again.

  I went from almost bored to intermittently very busy yesterday. I was still working on the video transfer project after dinner, but I did stop to enjoy roast chicken thighs with roast parsnips and roast carrots with rather unpleasant re-heated sprouts. I think I have learned a valuable lesson - never reheat sprouts....well maybe you can. I did consider converting one of the big roasting potatoes I have into mash, and then mashing the sprouts into it before roasting the mix until it was getting crispy. I am sure I would have had sprout based bubble and squeak as a kid, and I can't remember anything negative about it.

  I can't remember exactly when I did it, but some time in the late afternoon, or early evening, I spent more money on useful, but not essential stuff from Amazon. I had two products in mind, but things escalated a bit. I wanted a measuring jug, but bought two because I couldn't decide which one I really wanted. Then I wanted knife sharpener. I have an old, and pretty much worn out semi traditional one, plus a motorised gadget I once bought from Aldi. The latter made a lot of noise, but never seemed to put a good edge on a knife. Like the measuring jug, I couldn't decided on which of two relatively cheap sharpeners might be better, and so bought both.

  I also ended up buying another set of kitchen knives. It was probably little more than a year ago that I bought a set of three "Kitchen Devils" knives, and it wasn't long before I almost sliced my thumb off using one ! The paring knife is losing it's edge now, and that is the reason for buying the knife sharpeners. The new set of kitchen knives is a 5 piece set, and comes with a storage block - which will be handy, and was actually a main selling point. The final thing I bought was a set of scissors. Of course when I say "bought" I mean ordered, but three of the items have already been dispatched, and could be here on Wednesday.

  There was very little on TV last night....well not mid evening. There was stuff on later in the evening, but I wanted to be up early this morning, and so I opted for the luxury of reading in bed until I turned out the light at 9pm. I was asleep very soon after I turned out the light....at least I think I was. I know I was dreaming towards the end of the night, but otherwise I seemed to have slept quite solidly. I woke up around 6am this morning, and I was going to try and sleep more, but after 10 minutes  decided I would get up.

  My grand plan for this morning was to get up in time to have a good shower, and then to get out to Aldi to do some shopping soon after they opened. I arrived there by about 8.05am, and as expected/hoped for the place was still very quiet. It was also very cluttered by boxes all over the floor ready for the shelves to be re-stocked. Being there so early meant that I could take advantage of quite a few things, left over from yesterday, that were marked down to half price. This is an area where Aldi is far better than Tesco. Aldi don't worry about some under-manager, or some other idiot, thinking up a discount price that is possibly just a few pence off. Aldi just slap a half price sticker on anything that needs to be sold quickly, and their tills have a button to press to do the discount (provided the checkout operator noticed the big red label - which it appears they did).

  Walking in the cold made my right knee ache a bit, and I had a few more aches that spoiled any enjoyment I might have had from a walk in the fresh air. That cold air made me  a bit...hmm, I was going to say wheezy, but that is not accurate. I think just breathing easy, but deeper, and more heavily would be more accurate. Having never tried I can't say for certain, but it still feels like it would be difficult to breathe easily with a mask on. And that doesn't include the problem of my eyes slightly watering, and my nose running in the cold air - just like it does every winter for the last 50 or 60 years.

  I managed not to get too carried away, and spend too much in Aldi, although I could be tempted to go back on another early morning to get some Brexit emergency rations, and also some seasonal beers. On the whole I tried to avoid anything that was too sweet, and which might be too tempting as a snack, but of course there are other ways of overeating ! This morning I have not only had an unneeded breakfast, but a rather big breakfast. One half price purchase was a pack of breaded fish. I was going to have just two pieces, but when I opened the pack it smelled a bit fishy, and I thought that maybe I ought to cook all pieces before that slight fishyness got worse.

  This morning my blood glucose was an OK 7.8mmol/l. At any other time that would be fine, but today something like an super low of something like 3.0mmol/l (low enough to feel bad) would have been needed to get my average for the month down. I end this month on an average of 8.1mmol/l. It is OK, but not ideal. If only I hadn't had a few 9s nearer the start of the month I may have been OK.

  After my big breakfast I will probably have a snooze or something while it digests. I have no idea what I might do later today. I expect it will be something indoors, and nothing under that cold grey sky. Last night I was thinking that maybe I might be able to bring myself to do something in the garden, but the reality this morning is that sounds very unattractive now. I shall probably put on even more weight. Although, having said that, if I have a large bowl of soup for lunch, and eat some of the safer stuff I bought for dinner, I may almost get away with being very sedentary today - enough to put the next heart attack off for a few more months.