While there might have been some sunny spells later, it seems there will now be none ! The latest revision says dark grey clouds this morning, followed by light grey clouds for the rest of the day. It also says that the mist seen in the screenshot above will now only fall at 10am. Looking out the window I do see the first hints of a mist forming, but whether it actually does anything impressive is anyone's guess. The temperature dropped to minus 1° C during the night, but it is supposedly starting to warm now - where "warm" means a toe curling 4° C if we are very lucky. It seems that the mist, if it falls, is going to be the closest we get to rain today - which is a pity because it could fall as snow, and that would change the current grey misery to a far more agreeable view. Tomorrow may be an even more grey version of today. It will start very cold, but eventually warm up to 7 or even 8° C, and then, sometime soon after sunset it will probably rain.

    Until about 3pm my whole day, yesterday, revolved around waiting for my parcel from Amazon. I didn't make a note of the exact time it arrived, but if I had assumed that it would be a late delivery I would have missed it if I had gone for a walk in the afternoon sunshine. Luckily I stayed in. Aside from keeping an ear on the doorbell, yesterday was mostly like many recent days - I was quite busy doing nothing.

  Much of my doing nothing involved sitting at my PC. I did spend a bit of time laying on my bed reading, but the temptation to close my eyes and snooze would have been too strong. Sitting at my PC was the best way of staying alert. I scoured the internet for stuff to read or research, but it was hard finding anything new that grabbed my attention. For a while I switched to scanning some old (1990s) gig tickets. I did about a dozen before I realised I had done the same job many years ago. It was probably worth persevering a bit because because the last time I had saved them at a lower resolution, and hadn't attempted to describe them in the file name. I intend to finish the job of re-scanning them all again some time in the indefinite, but possibly close future.
  These were the things I was most anxious to be delivered....hmmm, "anxious" is not quite the right word - maybe "impatient" is a better word. There were a few other odds and sods, but I was curious to see what these gizmos were like. They are basically a little box with a built in rechargeable battery, and a bluetooth audio transceiver. They can be switched to either transmit, or receive audio,
  This all started before Xmas when I bought the unit on the left of the photo above.  Like the larger unit on the right, it too is a bluetooth audio transceiver. It is a more elegant, and more compact design, but other than that, the two units function identically. The first one I bought was occasionally very useful. I could use it as a receiver to stream music from my phone to the speakers in the dining room. In essence it gave those speakers the same bluetooth connection that the speakers in my living room have, but the combined prices of the non bluetooth speakers with the external adapter was cheaper than the otherwise identical speakers with bluetooth built in.

  It seemed like it might be useful to have a pair of these units to transmit audio from one room to another without using wires, but I bought the first on special offer, and when I went back to try and buy another the offer had ended, and the price had almost doubled. At about £12 is was priced like a toy, but at double the price I felt that without a pressing need to have it, it was too expensive. 4 or 5 days ago, whenever it was that I placed the order, I happened on the pair I have just bought, and they were under £12. I decided to grab a couple before they too went up in price (or disappeared completely following Brexit import problems).

  What I had originally been looking for, when I placed the Amazon order, was some memory sticks (thumb drives) with a USB-C connection to plug into mobile phones for data backups. It was Jodie who originally asked about them. She has a strong need to decant a lot of stuff from her clogged up phone. She showed me a web pages that said "special offer" "£35 off !", and asked if that was the sort of thing she needed. It was, but I just laughed. I could not believe the price they were asking. On Amazon I found 3 for the discounted price she nearly paid for one.

  The most expensive was a properly branded San Disk unit for £15. The other two were around £12 each. I'll give Jodie the San Disk one as it is probably more trustworthy than the no-name Chinese "thumb drives". I think the units bought from Amazon are probably rather better than those a friend keeps buying from eBay. He thinks he saves a pound or two by buying from eBay, but it seems most of them have had false firmware installed on them so a 16GB drive reports itself as a 256GB drive. They do work up to the point you try and store more than 16GB. They then sometimes crash and loose all data, or just send the data into a big black hole.

  One of the odd things about yesterday is that I didn't seem to feel so hungry during the day. With hindsight I realise it was probably the sunshine that was streaming through my window that distracted me from food. The knock on effect of that was that it was easy(ish) to control what I ate when I did eat. When it came to dinner I opted for a simple meal of grilled bacon and Heinz "Creationz" - "Mexican inspired beans". Those beanz weren't as sugar free as I would prefer, but they are not that bad. I felt confident enough to have a tub of low calorie ice cream for dessert.. I should have, and could have made better choices, but I enjoyed the food, and the end result was not too bad.

  There were very slim pickings on TV to amuse me during, and after dinner. I watched a bit of this, and a bit of that, but eventually gave up, and turned the TV off. I returned to try and find amusement on the internet, but I didn't have enough inspiration to search for anything that might really grab my intention. Ideally I would have found something I wanted to search for on Wikipedia, and had I done so I could have spent the rest of the night following interesting links, but just could not think of what that initial search should be about.

  I ended up in bed reading well before bedtime, but I made a fatal error. I was getting near the end of the book, and decided to finish the book last night. By the time I got to the end it was just past midnight. I reasoned that didn't matter because there was no reason to get up at any particular time this morning. I was wrong on one count - by the time I finished reading I had gone through the sleepy phase, and I had my second wind. It seemed like (but possibly wasn't) ages before I managed to fall asleep.

  Having finally fallen asleep I guess my sleep was fairly typical apart from the first 3 hours missing.It seemed to have little effect of the time I woke up - about 7.30am. Somehow I knew that any attempt to get more sleep would fail, and I just had to rely on the fact that I can have a snooze any time I fancy it today. I must admit that it feels like quite a bit of time has passed since first waking up, and starting to write this. I think I must have been that anything I did, I did very slowly.

  Apart from a couple of visits to the toilet, the most important things I have done are to measure my various health parameters. Most important of those, in fact the only important one, is my blood glucose level because it should influence the rest of my day. This morning it was 8.3mmol/l - still too high, but a useful bit lower than yesterday morning. Perhaps if I had not had that ice cream it would be lower still, and if I had not had the beans as well, it might have been under 8.0mmol/l.

  I had a few ideas for today, but when I look out the window, and consider the latest weather forecast update, I don't think I can be bothered with them because they all involved being outdoors. It is not nice out there ! (Although the latest revision to the forecast does predict a solitary sunny spell at around 2pm). I expect I'll scan some more of my old gig tickets, but other than that I have no idea what I'll do today.....actually one idea springs to mind - start reading a new book !