The latest revision to the forecast hasn't really changed the flavour of the earlier forecast in the screenshot above. The latest revision shows an extra hour without rain mid afternoon, but it has changed some light rain to heavy rain. The rain actually started as much as an hour later than shown in the screenshot. It was dry until 5 or 10 minutes before 9am. This morning has started off rather chilly. I concur with the forecast 4° C. The temperature will continue to slowly rise until it is (or could be) 12° C by midnight. This warmth will continue into tomorrow. Tomorrow may start wet, and that will drop the temperature just a degree or two, but maybe (and I suggest it is a big maybe) there will be some sunny spells in the afternoon, and with the temperature predicted to be back to 12° C it could feel delightfully warm in the sunshine.

   A lot of yesterday seems to be a blur. I don't think I did anything, or any external event happened that was worth remembering. There would be a lot more excitement from early evening onwards. Probably the one thing I did that should have been memorable, but that I have only remembered while writing these words, was that I did do a small amount of laundry. I could have left it until I had more to do, but with plenty of time on my hands, it seemed worthwhile to get it out of the way before it could grow to an amount that would have meant it was hard work washing it all by hand.

  My old PC was working fairly had yesterday, but for me it was only some short bursts of activity to set it up for another video editing job. One achievement (unless proved other wise) was that I think I now have the feel of the new, and very uninformative way of setting the video bit rate, which determines the video quality, when rendering the edited video to an mp4 file. There was one almost 60 minute video that I did twice because I had made some errors (and I suspect I found an easy to get around bug in the video editing program). The rendering time of a 60 minute video, if there are no complex corrections to the video, is at least 90 minutes, and as much as 2 hours. That gave me a lot of time to read or doze, or anything, while the rendering proceeded.


  One thing I aimed for yesterday (and was successful) was to get my blood glucose down to a nice safe level after the horrendous high two days ago, and the slightly high yesterday morning. While I have suggested that the best way was to fast until dinnertime, or to go for a 6 mile walk (where I can't eat anyway), I did neither, but I was a bit careful with what I ate. My breakfast, and lunch was rice crackers with ham...at least it was ham for one of them, but maybe it was cheese for the other. (Just plain cheese, and not the mango chutney flavoured that probably did me no favours the day before).

  Although I was expecting another very late delivery, I was on full alert for my last Amazon delivery (unless I make another order) from mid afternoon onwards. To my surprise, my delivery came in the middle of my dinner. That was both good because it was not stupidly late at night, but bad timing because my dinner was getting cold while I dealt with it.

  Dealing with it was obviously to open the three boxes (where one with three slots in it - as used occasionally for a single bottle !) and check the bottles in each. Two of the bottles where whiskies I hadn't originally wanted to order, but somehow they seemed to get on my order when I ordered Angela's xmas present. Being consumables they will definitely not go to waste.

  The bottle I was really waiting for was a bottle of Welsh whisky. To the best of my knowledge I cannot remember ever trying Welsh whisky before, although when booze is involved memories can be quite flexible. Last night, while my dinner was getting cold, I poured myself a shot glass full to give it a taste. It is not quite to my personal preference, and I guess I would only give it an 8 our of 10, but I will have no trouble drinking it. No trouble at all - although I will try to make the bottle last for as long as possible to make my whisky collection seem more extensive - just in case I have to entertain a whisky drinker.

  My dinner was almost a repeat of my dinner the previous night. Once again it was roasted, spiced, chicken thighs (where "spiced" actually meant drowned in super hot chilli sauce). The previous night I had mange tout with the chicken. Last night I had green beans. I allowed myself the luxury of glazing those beans with some butter.  I had a couple of apples for dessert.

  It was a bit later in the evening when disaster struck. Apart from playing some music, I had nothing important happening on my PC, and it seemed like a good time to install the latest updates. One update I should never have allowed to be installed. It was a new Linux kernel, and that would make such a fundamental change to the underlying system that a reboot would be needed after it was installed. The last time I did that the computer would not reboot, and I had to make some repairs.

  This time it was different. The installer made the same cock-up again, but this time it was made more complicated by it completely making a mess of the previous repair. I did not have the patience to confirm what was going wrong, but on the surface it seemed like it was re-installing the boot loader onto the wrong hard disk, and then the boot loader was trying run the operating system from a hard disk that didn't have an operating system on it. I tried a few repair attempts, but probably just made things worse.

  The final cure was to re-install the operating system from scratch. It is not a long job, maybe half an hour, but I had to do it twice because I either entered the password incorrectly, or there was some other corruption. The second attempt worked perfectly, and it was a huge relief to see my carefully customised desktop come up, and to be able to see all my files again. Before going to bed, because it was well after 9pm at this point, I reinstalled my usual apps, and I went to bed feeling.....probably more relieved than happy, but at least able to relax.

  It still took a bit of time before I managed to fall asleep, but once asleep I seemed to sleep OK. As usual, I woke every 2 or 3 hours for a pee....or I think I did. It all seems a bit dreamlike. This morning I woke up earlier than I wanted, and managed to get another half an hour or sleep before reluctantly getting up. My first thoughts was that it felt very chilly this morning. My temperature did not show a fever. It was quite the opposite ! It was just 34.9° C. When I think about it, that rather low temperature was probably because I had been sleeping so deeply...and if not, well it is a nice thought.

  One reason that my house felt extra cool was that I found my front door slightly ajar when I was coming back from my first pee of the morning. I suspect the latch hadn't caught when I came in clutching my three boxes of booze last night. Fortunately there was no, or little wind in the night, and the door was only open an inch or two, and probably not that noticeable from the road. I was actually more worried about waking up to house full of foxes, rats and mice !

  My efforts to get my blood glucose down worked OK again. This morning it was down to a very nice 7.3mmol/l. More days like this would be good to get this months average down to 7.5mmol/, but I am not going to hold my breath for that to happen. I allowed myself a light breakfast of more rice crackers with some cheddar cheese on them. The cheese will do my arteries no good, but neither it, or the rice crackers, will add any significant amount to my blood glucose.

  Today seems like it is going to be a lousy day (weatherwise), and I don't fancy going out at all in the rain, and yet I have already done so. I rushed out, just as the rain was starting, to go to the little supermarket on Catford bridge for a few things. Once upon a time it was the Turkish supermarket, but they no longer include Turkish in their name, and offer a much more cosmopolitan range of foods - including kiwi fruit that says boldly on the packet that they were grown in Greece. There is usually a lot of enmity between Greeks and Turks because of Cyprus, but that shops seems to have overcome their prejudices.
  Among my purchases this morning where these packets of crisps. I suspect that "grilled bacon" is going to be the same as smoky bacon crisps - nice, but I can't stand the smoky burps that seem to last for the next 24 hours - but they had to be tried. Kebab flavoured crisps had to be tried too. I doubt they will taste like kebab, but we live in hope. Of course the problem is that each packet probably has enough energy/calories for a 6 mile walk (or more), and I have doubts I will not be going on any walks like that in the near future. Nevertheless, they have to be tasted, and the best I can hope for is that I can put the packet down when only half empty, and save it for another day.

  I shall attempt not to open either packet today. I don't really know what I shall be doing today. It is highly unlikely I'll be going out in the rain. I guess I'll be spending a bit more time on my computers. My old PC still has some VHS transferred video to edit, and save as mp4 files. My main computer has some updates to install today. I will not allow it to install a new kernel because I don't want to spend all day trying the repair the damage that might do again. Most updates should be safe, and potentially beneficial.