The latest revision to the forecast says we should be having sunny spells as I write this, and I can see a few cracks in the cloud where the sun could creep through if those cracks were in the right part of the sky. I guess that is enough to be optimistic that the forecast for the afternoon includes a few long periods of sunshine, and sunny spells for the rest of the time. It should stay dry today, but the temperature will only be 7° C again. Tomorrow could be another degree less cold, but it will come at the expense of it being cloudy during daylight hours (or overcast as it was once called by me, if no one else). After sunset the clouds will thicken, and the evening could see some heavy rain.

   Yesterday was another day when it didn't feel like I did much, but that is not entirely true. I did devote a fair time to playing with the the two scam external hard drives I had ordered from Amazon. To recap, they were not the high speed devices they were advertised as. The one I opened up (see picture yesterday) was found to contain a very slow, USB 1 speed, USB thumb drive instead of an M2 style high speed solid state hard drive.  I had very strong doubts that it was a 1TB memory.

  The thumb drive had been "doctored" to wipe out the original manufacturers information, and to make what I think was originally a 64GB drive look like a 1TB drive. I spent a bit of time looking at reviews of similar drives on Amazon, and it seems they appear to be offered by several external sellers. All had terrible reviews, and one review included a picture taken by someone else who had prised the thing open to show the cheap thumb drive inside what is a nice looking case.

  One of my jobs today is to contact Amazon to return (or dispose locally) my two drives for a full refund. I have never tried this before, but I am assured that Amazon are quite good about this - unlike eBay who I hear nothing but tales of woe about. This morning I dug down into the rubbish bin to retrieve the original boxes to send them back in. I don't think I shall worry about the fact that I broke one open. I sort of hope that Amazon will suggest I dispose of them locally because provided I am careful, the thumb drives could have some use, and I could potentially but some big thumb drives to put in the old cases, but really there would be no point to that because I could just plug the thumb drives into a USB port as they are.

  The uselessness of those supposed external hard drives was one disappointment. Another was when I decided to get the metal polish out on one of the door push panels I had stripped of pain a couple of weeks ago. I would show a picture, but there is nothing to see. As far as I can make out, they are not brass, but tin plate. Long ago they would have been shiny and silvery like a baked bean can, but the tin plating seems to have been rubbed off many, many years ago. That is probably why they were painted over. Maybe a bit more elbow grease would start to raise a shine, but they just seem to be dull grey metal after a light polishing.

  I probably spent longer reading than doing anything else yesterday. I think I read several or more pages of the "Bill, The Galactic Hero" book the day before yesterday, but I read a lot more of it yesterday. It is funny, and just as absurd as the later book I read from the same series, but I am not so sure it was as funny. Maybe, being the first in the series (I think there are 5 or 6 books in the series) it needs some semi-sensible stuff to set the scene for the later books, or maybe reading to much too soon is dulling my appreciation. If the latter is the case then I had better be careful about reading the two new books that arrived yesterday, and another 2 that should arrive sooner or later. Perhaps I should read something by a different author next to give my humour buds a rest.

  After I found my blood glucose was nice and low yesterday morning I let my guard down. The worst thing I ate was a whole bag, a fair sized one, of spare rib flavoured crisps. They were nice, but I should have moderated myself better. I don't think I ate anything else that was really bad, although there remains a question mark over fruit. I did have 5 pieces of fruit for dessert after my very healthy dinner. The main course of my dinner was grilled lamb shoulder steaks with runner, and green beans.

  After dinner I spent a bit of time flicking around the TV channels, and in the end I settled on a programme called "Beatles Stories" on Sky Arts. It was interesting, but not gripping entertainment. In one respect it was amazing that people are still making money out of the Beatles 40 or more years later.  Oh well, it was a fair diversion for an hour before I went to bed. I guess that must have been around 9pm, but it could have been 8pm. In fact I am sure it was earlier than 9pm.

  I still had plenty of time to read a few chapters before turning out the light, and possibly falling asleep before 10pm. I'm not sure if I slept well or not. I can't recall any long periods of being awake in the night, but I did seem to be dreaming a lot. Several dreams seemed to be about trying to get my money back from Amazon for those dodgy drives. They all seemed to be small variations on the same thing. I also had a series of dreams about travelling across east London after leaving work. The details of that seem very vague, but I went through one or two pubs, and over a series of bridges in the Docklands area. I am not sure where I was actually going.

  I woke up fairly early this morning, and the first thing I had to do was to investigate why my broadband connection was down. I went down into the freezing front room, and rebooted the cable modem. Nothing happened at first. I suspect that Vermin Media were doing some work in their data centre while traffic should be very low early on a Sunday morning. After I had been to the toilet, and done the rest of my morning routine I found I was back on the internet again.

  This morning my blood glucose was back up to 8.8mmol/l again. That is not that bad, but nowhere near as satisfying as the 7.5mmol/l yesterday morning. I am not sure whether to blame the crisps, the fruit, or just not doing any exercise yesterday. I suspect it was the exercise I did the day before yesterday that was responsible for yesterday's perfect (by my standards) figure.

  It is bright and sunny now, and in theory I could go out for some exercise. That could be nice because although cold, it is not "bloody freezing !" this morning. I could go out in a much lighter coat, and that would make the experience more enjoyable. I definitely want to go out to the little supermarket on Catford Bridge to buy a few things, but I am not sure I want to go much further for two reasons. One reason is that my guts feel a bit volatile this morning. It could just be trapped wind, but I'll have to see. The other reason is that I think I'll be having a beer drinking session this afternoon, and I need to do a bit of tidying up before that. The first thing I ought to do is to go to Amazon's web site and have a good moan about those dodgy external "hard drives".