The sky seemed clear by 8am, and once the sun had risen high enough to clear the roof line to the east the day turned sunny - a good hour earlier than shown in the forecast. The sun is shining brightly as I write this. The other feature this morning was some huge puddles left from heavy rain in the night. The current revision to the forecast says there will be sunny spells from now until midday. That could turn out to be correct because I can see patchy cloud developing now, and the odd cloud is very likely to pass across the face of the sun for a (hopefully) short while. The temperature is slowly rising from 10° C, and having another go at hitting 12° C by 11am. It will only drop a few degrees after sunset. Rain is expected today, but the latest revision to the forecast now says there will be a couple of hours of light rain from about 6pm. Tomorrow may be a degree or two cooler, but of the forecast holds, there will be sunny spells from about 9am until 3pm. I can imagine that changing a lot by tomorrow mornings forecast.

   When I think about it, I seemed to be fairly busy yesterday, and yet I am sure it couldn't have added up to more than 4 or 5 hours of being active. My only physical exercise was to do another small amount of laundry. Yesterday it was a hand towel and a t-shirt. My cerebral exercise (what ?????) was to spend what could have been an hour or more of designing a new set of icons to use on the 2021 pages of this web site. I also "designed" a web page for next January to test the new icons.

  The longest, but also the shortest bit of work I did was editing, to clean up, plus top & tail, more transfers of old TV programmes recorded on VHS tape to digital files. I had done the recording to un-edited mpg digital video file some days ago. Yesterday I just had to clean the ends up, take out some adverts in the middle, and then render the final cut to more space efficient mp4 files. I had to do about 10 minutes work, and the computer would do the other 30 to 60 minutes work.

  It was my intention to try and continue to be careful about what I was eating to keep my blood glucose down to the 7.3mmol/l it was yesterday morning. I failed ! Maybe it was because I was too casual after seeing that nice low figure in the morning. Much, but surely not all, blame for a rather high figure this morning, must lay with eating half the packet of the grilled bacon crisps I showed a picture of yesterday.

  The ironic thing is that I didn't think those crisps were that wonderful. As expected, they did taste a bit like smoky bacon crisps, but not quite as strong. The most commendable thing was that I was not burping smoky bacon flavour for the rest of the day. I also ate 4 very ripe kiwi fruit, but I seem....or at least, I think I have gotten away with eating them before. These were extra ripe, on the verge of being over ripe, and so tasted very sweet. maybe that made a difference. They tend to be quite tart when I usually eat them.

  I did eat two unknowns with regard to my blood glucose levels. One of them I have suspected of raising it, and it, or should I say, they are tomatoes. Once again they were almost too ripe, and so may have been sweeter than a more firm tomato. The other unknown is shallots. Along with the tomatoes I gave 3 small shallots (the long ones) a good grilling before grilling a steak on them. It made for a nice dinner, but possibly not as safe as hoped. I followed it with a tub of one of those low calorie and low sugar ice creams. I have definitely got away with eating those before with no bad effect.

  There is not a lot to say about most of me sleep last night. I was probably fast asleep between 10 and 11pm. I guess that is a bit later than I usually try for, but once asleep I seemed to sleep well. Sometime my sleep was light enough for some long dreams, but apart from a few lingering ideas about what they may have been, not enough remains in memory to describe - except possibly one dream.

  That possible exception is because something happened at just gone 5am, and I don't know if it was a dream, or if it actually happened. I thought I was woken up by a strange noise. It sounded like a sharp, but brief rattle of rain against the window followed by a sort of soft thump. It was all over before I was fully awake, and I couldn't locate the source of te sound. I thought it may have come from inside my bedroom, and I had fears that the front door had sprung open again, and cat or fox had wandered in.

  I felt fairly sure the front door was definitely closed because after finding it open in the night the night before, I double checked it before I went to bed. I wondered if it could have been a mouse, but it seemed too loud for a mouse. The only thing I know for definite is that it effectively signalled the end of my sleep for the night, and that later on, with the lights on, I could not find anything disturbed anywhere indoors. I now think that it was just a rattle of heavy rain blown against my bedroom window, although I can't think how that could end with a very soft thump.

  One notable thing this morning was that my body temperature was very low. Having rechecked the spreadsheet I recorded it on, I see that it was actually very average for just after getting out of bed. I was getting it confused to my temperature after getting home from shopping in Aldi. The real bad reading was my blood glucose, as I said further up the page, I was hoping I might have managed to keep it low. I hadn't ! It was 9.0mmol/l, and that is on the edge of the danger zone.

  In theory I was up early enough to get ready to go shopping very early, but to go out just slightly early I had to omit washing my hair this morning. Fortunately it is not too bad, and should last another day. I did have a good scrub under the shower though. I had turned the gas up on the water heater to compensate for the low ground temperature a few days ago, but after a couple of mild days it was quite a hot shower, and I was concerned I would turn up at Aldi still sweating, but it was cool enough outside to make sure I was also feeling cool when I got to Aldi.

  Today was one of those days when I seemed to end up with rather a lot in my shopping trolley. I didn't really realise it at the time that I was evidently stocking up for winter and/or Brexit. I seem to have bought a lot of cheese among other stuff. I almost made a point of trying to avoid stuff that I know will raise my blood glucose, but I made a deliberate error on one product. It was only while dropping the second packet of ready to east chestnuts that I saw that they have quite an appreciable sugar content. Maybe that is why they go so well with sprouts. I think I will wait a good few days before making "sprout deluxe" !

  With so much to carry home I was feeling quite hot when I got home with it all. It was enough for a sweaty forehead, but my forehead sweats far too easily. However one reason for feeling very hot when I got home was because it seems I had an anti-fever. My temperature was down to 34.9° C, or 3° below average for humans, but evidently normal for me. I have observed these low temperatures when coming back from long walks too.

  I can see some nasty dark clouds in the sky now, and it makes me doubt the one thing I was hoping for today. On the assumption that there would still be several hours of sunny spells, or better, I was going to go for a walk in the park today.  The Met Office forecast still says there should be sunny periods until midday, but the BBC (Meteogroup) forecast says light rain is about to fall. Judging by the look of some of those clouds it is possible the BBC is correct. I'll give it another half hour to see how the weather looks, and if it is raining, or just too gloomy out, I will have to think of something else to do.















   One thing I may do tomorrow morning is to make a return visit to Aldi. I noticed that they are doing a tray of 24 cans of Guinness for just £20. One or two trays would be very handy. The only trouble is that this morning they only appeared to have two trays left, and by tomorrow they may have none.