There was a lot of rain during the night, and I am not sure if it is finished even now. I can't see any rain at the moment, but it is very wet outside. After a mild night it is still around 9° C, but from now on the temperature will slowly fall to a very chilly 3° C tonight - and maybe just 2° C by midnight. Much of today is going to be rather grey, and very uninspiring, but there could be some sunshine later in the afternoon. The latest revision to the forecast shows 4pm to sunny, rather than just sunny spells. At 7am tomorrow it is predicted it will start to rain when the temperature is only 2° C. That should be cold enough for snow, but the forecast just says rain. I can imagine that on high ground, such as Biggin Hill, it could well fall as snow. It will warm to around 8° C tomorrow, but the rain is predicted to continue through the whole day !

    The curious thing about yesterday was that walking back from Aldi, with my heavy shopping, was the last time my knee/leg/ankle/foot hurt. Just as it came on quickly for no apparent reason (beyond the weather being cold and damp), it seemed to just fade away during yesterday morning. I don't know when it actually stopped hurting because I might have just thought I had it in a more comfortable position or something, but at some time I suddenly thought "wow, my leg doesn't hurt any more".

  I seem to remember it feeling a bit stiff and aching when I had the unpleasant job of finishing the laundry I had started the day before. (It was unpleasant because it was stone cold, and the soap felt almost slimy when cold). Maybe it was after hanging up that washing to dry when I realised I was no longer in pain. Than again maybe it was after that. There was another lack of "pain" yesterday.

  It was by no means warm yesterday, but the rise from 3 or 4°  to 8 to 10° C made doing the washing up, and other tasks in the kitchen, a much more comfortable experience. There is no heating in the kitchen, and while it was only 3° C outside, beer kept in the kitchen didn't really need any chilling at all. Spending any time in there produced all sorts of aches. Yesterday was very different - no aches or pains, but it was still cool enough not to want to spend too much time in there.

  Doing the shopping in the morning, and then later doing the laundry and washing up, seemed to make me feel I had accomplished more than I had in recent days. I felt much less guilty about doing some intensive relaxation ! Oddly enough I did less relaxation than it sounds. I spent a bit of time experimenting with my new bluetooth transceivers. I found I had done the right thing in buying an identical pair of them. I couldn't pair the new ones with the original one I had bought, and that inspired me to buy the pair of new ones. They will all pair with my PC, or my bluetooth headphones.

  One experiment I wanted to try was to see if it was possible to use the two now ones to link a microphone wirelessly. The output of most microphones is very low, and an ordinary one didn't work. However, many, many years ago I bought a couple of microphones to use on my old analogue camcorder (this must have been mid 1980s). The first one I bought was faulty. The little pre-amp in it, powered by a button cell, appeared to be faulty. I found it OK to bypass it, and in some cases, where there was a lot of sound, it worked better without it.

  I bought another identical microphone, and that worked OK, but it saw almost no use because the one I modified worked quite well enough. Yesterday I dug the unmodified one out. I had to use a lint roller to get all the fluff and dirt of the wind shield, and unsurprisingly I had to replace the 40 year old button cell, but it worked - sort of. Even with the built in pre-amp the output was still rather low, but that wasn't the main problem.

  I had been thinking that  remote microphone could be useful when shooting video, but I didn't consider the lag caused by the digital encoding and decoding process. I could easily say a quick "one two" into the mic before I heard my words come out the receiver. In some instances that may not matter, but it would completely mess up lip sync if I were videoing someone speaking or singing. The same would be true if I was trying to video birds singing. I don't think I will be using these transcievers for videoing. (I do have a radio mic intended for stage use, and I could use that, but it is old, and I think the frequency it uses is now used for digital TV or something.

  Yesterday was another day when I tried to avoid too much that would adversely affect my blood glucose. I didn't avoid everything though. I had some nice sweet fruit for one thing. My dinner was half safe and half not safe. It all started when I bought a bag of half price sprouts from Aldi. It was the perfect excuse to have them with chestnuts for dinner, and that is what my dinner was - just sprouts and chestnuts cooked in some beef stock. It was not as nice as expected.

  it has been a very slow lesson, but after maybe 5 or 6 years, I have concluded that the only way sprouts work with chestnuts is when bacon is involved - and ideally all three ingredients should be fried together. I'm not sure if I could emulate that in my mini grill/oven. Anyhow, the sprouts were pretty low in anything detrimental, but possibly contained good stuff - vitamins and/or minerals etc. The chestnuts provided plenty of fibre, but the packet said they contain a lot of sugar - presumably natural, rather than added sugar.
  It is not always easy to predict if beer contains a lot of sugar or not. The yeast should convert all the sugar (from the barley) to alcohol, but I think sometimes the fermentation is stopped early to give a sweeter beer. The Belgium Abbey Beer I bought in the morning did seem to have a hint of sweetness. I only opened the one bottle yesterday, but I liked it, and as I think I said yesterday, these bottles, with their champaign like wired  cork, should last well beyond their official use by date. Therefore I shall buy a few more if they have any left next Monday.

  While I was eating dinner I felt quite warm, and I turned the heating off. Maybe an hour later I began to feel chilly while sedately watching TV. I turned the heating on full blast to quickly warm the room up. The only trouble is that I forgot it was on full. As I was getting ready for bed I was feeling very warm. At first I thought it was good, and that I could save energy by leaving the heating off while I was in bed. That is when I realised it was on full blast !  At that point I turned it completely off again.

  I read in bed...actually it was on, rather than in my bed, for about an hour. Towards the end of that hour I was feeling cool again, and so on went the heater again, but this time definitely on low. I can't really remember if I had any trouble getting to sleep last night. I guess that probably means I didn't have any trouble at all. I woke once or probably twice for a pee in the night, but I guess I got some good sleep because I seemed ready to get up at 5am. I fought that for about an hour, but at 6am (or whenever it was) I started to get up.

  This morning I seemed to feel better than I have done (first thing in the morning) for ages. Sadly it didn't last. One curious thing is that my morning blood glucose has gone very stable. For the last 4 mornings it has been 8.3mmol/l. That is high, but not dangerously so. As I have mentioned before, the worst thing is that it leaves no room for error, and in a way I have already made an error.

  When I woke up at 5am I felt, or thought I felt, hungry. It was one reason why I probably could not get back to sleep very easily. I now think I probably wasn't hungry, and the growling from my stomach was actually trapped wind. Having "unplugged the seal", so to speak, I have been passing a lot of wind this morning. That wasn't the real error. The real error was having some breakfast.

  There were several things I could have had for breakfast, but I decided I would use the rest of the wonderful olive bread I bought a few days. It was a good decision in so much as after three days it was losing it's wonder. I had it dry with some slices of cheese. Eating it made me feel very weary, and I really wanted to lie down rather than sit here writing. Maybe I will lay down and do a bit of reading when I have uploaded this to the web server.

  That still leaves the question of what I will do for the rest of the day. Yesterday, when the forecast said it would be a sunny afternoon, I thought I might go for a walk, but the gloom outside, and the reduced amount of sunshine in the latest forecast, seems to be eroding that idea with undue haste. I guess it is still possible I might go for a walk, but maybe I might do some work in the garden.....

  That last sentence was written before I rechecked the weather forecast for a later revision. It now says there is a 30% chance of drizzle at 1pm, but 3 and 4pm should now have full on sunshine. Potentially I could go out at 3pm, but usually by the afternoon I am either too busy doing something else, or too relaxed. I don't think I can predict what I will be doing today.