Only in the latest revision to the forecast has a hurried addition of sunshine been added to the forecast for this morning. Even then it only mentions sunny spells, but the sun seems to have been shining for about half an hour now. Another change is that the temperature is now shown as 1° C instead of 2° C. That agrees with the 0.9° C seen on my own outdoor thermometer. The latest revision has changed to show just a light cloud covering, instead of heavy, and added another hour of sunny spells for 2pm (as well as at 3pm, as per the early forecast in the screenshot above). Curiously enough, while the Met Office have thinned the clouds, and increased the sunny spells, the BBC forecast has removed the the sunny spells, and shows the cloud as being thicker. It also shows some rain and sleet for 1am tomorrow morning. The Met Office forecast shows today, and tomorrow as completely dry. Today may peak at 5° C, but tomorrow may only peak at just a bloody chilly 3° C.
 
    I came very close to going out for a walk yesterday. I got fully dressed for the outdoors, except for putting my coat on, at just after midday. I was looking forward to a walk with some trepidation because I was wearing a different pair of jeans. The jeans were old, but showed little sign of wear because they have a "funny" fit. For one thing the legs were far too long. Once upon a time I may have tried to reduce the length by just doing an internal turn up, and maybe I would have kept it in place by using some PVA wood glue (it works well on cotton too !). This time I just used a pair of scissors to cut 3 inches off the bottom of each leg. With no hem it will soon start to fray - unless held together by mud.

  The black jeans I had been using for my walks in the muddy park had a good crust of mud at the bottoms of the trouser legs. I thought it was about time I washed them. Of course that meant finding a replacement pair, but not one of my better pairs. I went through my collection of jeans until I found a blue pair. These were the pair with the too long legs. The waist was loose because they were a bit bigger than I needed, but It didn't come up as high as most of the jeans I wear. That gives them a sort of "falling down" feeling, bu after wearing them for an hour or so that feeling started to fade.

  So there I was, ready to put my coat on and go out when I felt a desire to go to the toilet. It was not an urgent desire, but it probably would have been if I had left it much longer. I went up to the toilet, and after sitting down the results were a bit explosive. I have a feeling it was the tail end of the stomach upset I had the previous day, and that was responsible for some fart that would transgress the laws about chemical weapons. I felt a bit shook up after that visit to the toilet, and it killed my desire to go out again.

  I needed some other things to do, and I found two things. The first, and most obvious was to wash the black jeans I had been using for my walks in the muddy park (and before it was muddy). After the wash in detergent the water was black, but that was mainly the dodgy third world black dye coming out, but the bottom of the big bucket I was using had a later of sludge in it. Five plain water rinses, and one rinse in fabric conditioner, and those smey and grubby looking jeans came out looking fresh and clean. I have to admit than wringing out jeans by hand is hard work !

  One of my very long term ambitions has now, after thinking about it for over 30 years, has now started to happen. On the door into the dining room, and on the door from the dining room into the kitchen, there are illustrated push (?), Strike (?), ???? plates that have been painted over many times since the house was built. I want to restore them to how I think they once were.

  I am sure they were originally embossed brass, and if cleaned well enough, they should look like bright shiny brass. As far as I can see they show a tall Greek lady reaching up to bunches of grapes.

  The idea of cleaning them has come to a head as part of my rehabilitation of my dining room. I have done almost nothing in there for weeks and maybe months since getting it into a usable state for Thursday drinking session. That does mean I have done nothing, but in these cold and grey days there has been little inspiration to tackle anything big. However, when I made a recent Amazon order I included a tub of gel based paint stripper. Yesterday I made a start at trying it out.

  At this point I have to admit I am learning how to use this paint stripper as I go along, and I am not sure if I am using it correctly. The difficulty is that I am not stripping a flat surface. If I was stripping paint from the door itself I could have just painted the gel on it, left it a few hours (maybe more), ans then used a scraper to (hopefully) peel off long strips of paint. It is not so simple on embossed brass.

  The picture on the left shows the mess after my first application of stripper. I should have masked around the plate because I got too much stripper on the door itself. That doesn't matter in the long run because I intend to paint the door one day. Although the plate itself looks a horrible mess of bubbling paint and stuff, a bit more detail is being revealed of the underlying picture. The bunches of grapes are now very obvious, although the woman's outline is rather vague. I was hoping that by this morning the gel would have dried, and I could use something like duct tape to pull off the loose paint, but I think the paint is still like a soggy jelly. It makes me wonder if I am going to end up using something like a fine bladed screwdriver to scrape the paint out of the crevices. This could be a long job !

  I don't think I really did anything else of any note yesterday, although I did learn to use my new non-contact thermometer properly. I didn't realise that once turned on you have to point the sensor at the forehead (or other places), trigger a reading, and then, most importantly, wait until the thing beeps to say it has taken the measurement. I was finally able to measure my forehead temperature. It is not very accurate compared to an under the tongue measurement, but I can see that it would show a high fever even if the exact figure was a bit vague.

  Once again, I didn't manage to reach a decent combination of factors to reduce my blood glucose when eating yesterday. I was also handicapped when one tin of tomato and basil soup turned out to have quite a lot of sugar in it. I should have cut down after that, but I didn't enjoy the tomato soup. It was just like boiled tomatoes rather than "cream of tomato". However, I did enjoy the oxtail soup I had after it (particularly with a squirt of hot pepper sauce in it), and I couldn't resist the idea of another can of oxtail soup. Three cans of soup for lunch is a bit excessive, although I could easily have eaten something far worse !

  At least those three cans of soup were filling enough to keep me going until dinner time without stopping for any snacks. The worst thing about dinner was that it was ready meals - sometimes nice, and sometime very nice, but occasionally not nice. The liver and bacon with mashed potato was not nice. The bacon tasted very strange, and had an unpleasant consistency. It was like very thinly sliced, extremely fatty bacon that had been cooked on a dirty griddle. It had a sort of old grease sort of taste. Part two, a beef hash ready meal, was very nice, but like most many ready meals it was not healthy eating. To make matters even worse I had a tub of (semi) low calorie/sugar ice cream.

  The first of last night's Star Trek episodes, an episode of Deep Space Nine, was one of the better stories from that series, but the episode of Star Trek: The New Generation that followed on another channel, seemed like one I had seen too often (or at least too recently), and I could not get excited about it. I think I turned the TV off before it finished, but I did turn the TV on again later for an episode of QI.

  My sleep last night was a bit odd in as much as it didn't seem like I was sleeping well until I had slept it, and then with hindsight I could say I slept OK. If that sounds twisted it is probably because it is. I am sure there were a few times in the later part of the morning when I was dreaming I was awake - which is sort of weird. It is hard to estimate how long in total I was awake in the night, but I probably fell asleep around 10pm last night, and I woke up at 7am feeling mostly OK apart from a bit of a light headache that soon cleared. I guess I got a fair portion of sleep.

  This morning I do not feel very dynamic, but otherwise I guess I feel comfortable. I did not that my temperature was a bit higher this morning. It was 35.7° C soon after getting out of bed, and that is as much as 0.3° C higher than average (and a very long way from "official" fever temperature). My blood glucose is still higher than I like, but at 8.6mmol/l it is a bit lower than the day before. In my darkest thought I feel I will never get it much lower until a warm sunny day comes along. I seem to be feeding for a long cold winter at the moment, and in my imagination that desire is coming from some deep and primitive part of my brain that I have no control of.

  Once again I will attempt to go out for a walk today. At the moment we have lost the sunshine, but there is still a lot of blue sky to be seen, and the clouds are thin and streaky. The sun might come out again. That does give me a little more enthusiasm to go out into the icy cold. Before that I may have to go out to the pharmacy. I phoned them to order another repeat prescription yesterday, and the girl said to phone back this morning to see if it is ready to collect. She seemed to think that the drug that has always had to be ordered is now kept in stock, and so they could have my complete prescription ready today, but I very much doubt it....we shall see !