The rain may have stopped before midnight last night, but it has already started again rather earlier than the forecast predicts. The latest prediction is that the rain will continue until midday. I have a feeling it might go on longer than that. Today is one of those days when the forecast changes a lot with each revision. The latest change is that 1 to 3pm will see sunny spells, but rain will fall again at 5pm. From 6pm there may only be light cloud for the rest of the night. Today's high is now predicted to be 10° C. That is not bad, and may feel OK if we do get those sunny spells this afternoon. Most of tomorrow will probably be wet. The day marks a rather vivid transition back to colder weather. The morning may be 8° C, but by late afternoon the temperature could be down to 2° C, and the rain may turn to sleet.

  Yesterday was quite a mixed day with some highs and some lows. The lows mainly concern my Costochondritis flare up - if indeed that is what it is. There was some anecdotal evidence to support this idea of mine. Initially I was feeling OK, but as I mentioned yesterday, I was also feeling like the inflammation was just simmering below the surface, and waiting to bite back if I did anything foolish.

  Sometime the foolish is actually necessity. It was about midday when my delivery arrived from Star Bargains arrived. This time it came in 2 boxes. The more delicate, crushable items came in their own box. Taking that in from the doorstep was easy. The other box, containing lots of heavy bottles of drink, plus some canned food, was a real bugger to pick up and take into the back room.

  I don't think I realised just how much I had ordered until it arrived. I just kept adding stuff until I reached the minimum of £40 when delivery is free. On the whole most of it was sensible, but some wasn't. Some items, like coconut rings, have a rather high sugar content. Ordering those was deliberate because I fancied something nice, and I resigned myself to try and make them last as long as possible by maybe only eating one a day - easy for some, but not for me !

  The really stupid, stupid thing was not only ordering Diet Coke, Cherry flavour, but also ordering Coke Zero, Cherry flavour. Coke Zero is OK, but I have never learned to love it. Cherry flavour Coke is probably one of their worst "weird" flavours. It reminds me too much of vile Dr Peppers, although it is probably less than half vile as that. Ordering a couple of small bottles to pad the order out, and occasionally drink as a novelty item would have been fair enough, but 2 full sized bottles of the Diet Coke version, and 2 smaller bottles of the Coke Zero version was just going too far.

  I think the heavy box had about 12 litres of drink in it in total, and so was bloody heavy. Picking it up was not that hard, and it caused no pain at the time, but it wasn't long after that my chest started aching again. As usual it was not a strong pain, but it came from two distinct areas either side of my sternum - slightly lower than my man boob on the left, and around about the same height as my right man boob. A couple of Ibuprofen tablets calmed it down, but my chest still felt creaky - and it was literally creaky. A typical example might be when drying my hands on a towel I could feel, more than actually hear, creaking, popping, scraping sounds from my rib cage as I moved my arms around.
  Before moving on the next main event of the day (the delivery was the first) I did some photography. I wasn't meaning to do any photography, but sometimes you see things and run to grab your camera. It is not unusual to see a fox on a shed roof, and they like this fairly level shed roof about two gardens from the rear of my garden. I had to use full zoom on my little Canon iXus 285 to take this snap. It has come out a bit grainy because it was not very bright at the time. Not being bright is probably why the fox was posing so well. 10 minutes earlier there was a sunny spell, and I suspect the fox was doing a bit of sunbathing. It now looks cross because the sun had gone in.
  After emptying the boxes my delivery came in I cut them up, and took them out to the recycling bin. It was then that I noticed the first signs that spring is on it's way. These self propagated daffodils had sprung up unnoticed until yesterday. I was surprised to see one bud that could soon be flowering. Shame it is just one, but maybe others will follow.
  I don't, or didn't think these were daffodils, but maybe they are even if they do look stunted. The buds seem to look too big to be crocuses, maybe they are. The one thing I do know is that they are perilously close to being run over by the brown wheelie bin.
  These are two more bulbs sprouting by the big green tube that carries the cable broadband/TV cables across my garden. These sprouts are less mature than the others, but I think they will turn out to be daffodils too. Once I feel the weather has improved enough I feel I want to do some extra gardening in my front garden. I would like more daffodils out there, but it is too late to plant them now, but I have other seeds that I will start indoors and transplant out later when they have started to grow properly. Like the back garden, I really out to do a lot more weed control in the front garden - maybe even more since it is on public view.

  Apart from popping outside to take the above snaps of my front garden, I also went outside to say hello to Michael, and collect the bottles of Diet Coke he had bought for me in Tesco. We were outside for 5, maybe even 10 minutes chatting during another sunny spell, and it felt good outside. There was no wind, or at least not enough to register on my memory, and if it didn't actually feel warm, it certainly didn't feel cold. I really can't wait until that is an everyday occurrence.

  The second main event of the day was another Thursday afternoon boozing session with Jodie. I was looking forward to my first booze since the weekend, and looking forward to the booze taking over from, and being more effective than the Ibuprofen I had taken earlier. I needed it because I decided to search my beer stock for something to drink. That involved more heavy lifting. Very soon after that I had a sharp reminder that I had been stupid. I needed to go up stairs for something (I don't think it was for a wee on this occasion, but it could have been).

   As I went up to the second step of the stairs I felt a sharp stabbing pain on my right hand side - broadly in the same place as where I had earlier had a dull ache. I don't think it was something bad happening, and instead I suspect with hindsight it was something bad unhappening. Anyone who has ever had a dislocation will know the very sharp, but also very brief pain that happens when a dislocated joint re-locates. It was a lot like that.  It was as if my fantasy "twisted rib" had untwisted, and who knows, it could have been just that.

  We had quite a selection of beers yesterday afternoon, and as usual we split each can or bottle, so the amount was less than it appeared. Once again Jodie had brought a few "beers" that I didn't really like. One even had pineapple in it ! They were very tart, and closer to cider than beer. It seems she has really tuned her tastebuds to some of these abominations. Oh well, they all had alcohol in them - quite a lot in 2 of the three cans (and maybe the third as well).

  I showed the packet, pictured on the left, to Jodie. In a way I was teasing her because she really doesn't like any spicy food, but she is most definitely a vegetarian.  I'm sure I mentioned that I had bought two of the sachets from the same maker, but different flavours when I was in Aldi on Monday morning. I'm sure I must have also mentioned that I had tried one of them - a sort of vegetarian chilli-con-carne.

  I expected the latter to be like red beans and rice with some spices, but it had unpleasant lumps of "vegetable protein" in it. Those lumps had no obvious taste, good or bad, but they did have the consistency of damp cardboard - which was rather unpleasant. If it wasn't for those lumps it might have made a nice small meal, or snack. I now fear that this Spicy Pad Thai will have similar lumps that spoil it.

 Jodie left to get her train home just in time for me to watch the closing credits of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. That is then followed by Star Trek: Enterprise. I watched the latter, but I hadn't prepared any dinner to eat while I watched it. I turned to my new delivery from Star Bargains and "cooked" two big pots of instant noodles. Maybe it was the booze, but they did seem very nice, and two of those big pots did seem quite filling.

   Later on I was full of booze, and hot food, and in theory I could have been in bed, and been fast asleep quite early, but I started reading. Worse than that, I started reading the last chapter of the book. I was two pages from the end when my eyes started to close. At that point I hadn't brushed my teeth, so I went and did that, read those last two pages, and very quickly fell asleep. That must have been quite late - maybe 11pm, and possibly later.

  I seemed to get to sleep easily enough, but I am not sure it was good sleep. I seemed to be dreaming all night, although I can't really remember much from those dreams, but it was worse than that. I had the heater on low last night, and with the temperature outside still at least 9° C by midnight, I probably didn't need any extra heat. I didn't always feel that warm, but that was probably after visits to the cold bathroom. I would get back in bed, cover up, and start to cook myself as I slept. Twice I woke up after it was obvious I had been sweating enough to make my pillow damp, and there were damp patches on the sheet and duvet.

  I assumed it was just ordinary overheating, but it could have been fever. The latter would explain why I felt so cold, but not actually shivery when I went to the bathroom. The other reason for bad sweating is high blood glucose, and I was sure that had made it worse. I expected my blood glucose to have gone through the roof this morning. I had eaten several overtly sweet things, and most of what else I ate was all carbohydrates. I was very surprised when I checked my blood glucose this morning. It was only 8.6mmol/l. That was up on the 8.4mmol/l yesterday morning. It is higher than I am happy with, but mostly, as I have mentioned before, because it leaves very little room for those occasions when you deliberately want or need to have a high sugar day for whatever reason.

  I am unsure how the rest of my feels. A bit earlier on my chest was just hinting of a couple of aches, but as I sit here typing I feel fairly comfortable - except for the pain I still get in my right buttock and leg after I broke my buttock (?!?!??) in a fall last summer. I would like to feel enthusiastic about going out for a walk today. It would potentially do me good, but I am not convinced the weather would be good for it. The latest revision to the forecast still says sunny periods will follow after the last of the rain at midday. It is actually getting close to midday now (I must either be writing very slowly these days, or writing a lot more than I used to), and indeed the rain has stopped early. There are subte hints the sun could break through the clouds - particularly to the west where the sun isn't (yet) !

  It is feasible that I could suddenly decided to grab my coat and camera, and go out later, but I don't feel that enthusiasm at the moment. I have started one diversion already - some laundry soaking in detergent that I ought to finish soon rather than leave it until it is cold and slimy. I seem to have a feint urge to get out my old PC, and do some more VHS to digital video transfers. That may have been inspired by seeing an awful quality transfer I had made 3 or 4 years ago. My new video converter box does a far better job than anything except my DV camcorder, but that sees some noise from old tapes as a copy protection signal. It is really annoying when digitising an old tape when halfway through a small wrinkle in the tape triggers the copy protection circuit, and kills the recording. I guess I have plenty of stuff I could do today - even if none of it is as healthy as a walk.