It did look like there might be a fair bit of sunshine today, but as usual there has been a few hasty revisions to the forecast since someone in the weather centre stepped outside for a fag, and saw what the real world was doing. It has been sunny for most of the morning but the latest revision to the forecast says that sunshine will soon be ending. Like yesterday, there could be a brief glimpse of sunshine at sunset. Most of the day will just feature a 100% cover of white cloud, and it is now thought that it will stay dry. The temperature should still reach 12° C. Tomorrow could feature a lot of rain, and be slightly cooler.
  It is interesting to look at the BBC's early morning forecast for today. It shows a far more optimistic forecast that may well be wrong, but it is subsequent days that are pure fantasy. All those days when mist is forecast must have been a computer glitch, or a drunken operator. In the next revision all the mist has disappeared, but there are still odd bits in those headline figures. 

  Yesterday was one of those days where everything seemed to work out OK. It got off to a good start when I decided I just had to activate my new Tesco Savings Bank card. It wasn't absolutely perfect because the Tesco Bank website wasn't laid out quite the same way as the letter telling me how to set up my old account with up to date information, and then activate my new card. What made it tricky was that instead of a linear list of options to take, some where off to one side of the page, and the eye didn't alight on them naturally. Anyway, the deed was done, and it was less aggro than I was expecting.

  My next little job was to hand wash a double fitted sheet (and also a pair of underpants that were in the washing basket). It was sort of curious that some muscles complained a fair bit when wringing it out, and yet the entire job was not tiring...well maybe it might be better to say not completely tiring. I still fancied a quick lay down, and reading a few pages from the book I am reading before I fancied any more action.

  The next action was gardening. It was a shame that the morning sunshine was well over before I was ready to do the gardening. First of all I had to take the brown, garden waste, wheelie bin through the house, and into the back garden. As I mentioned yesterday, a fox had pooed on one of the wheels, but it was around a week ago, and fortunately it was dry and easy to knock off the wheel before bringing it into the house.
  This is the traditional "before" picture. This is what I guess I could call the vegetable bed. It is where I had potato and tomato plants last year. As you can see it is thick with weeds and some dried remains of other plants.
  After an hours hard work it looked like this. It is not 100% weed free, but a lot of the bits of greenery that can be seen are odd bits of plants or leaves that I couldn't be bothered to pick up. All the bending over was taking it's toll on me, and it became harder and harder to bend low enough. Not only that, but all the effort got me sweating. That would have been no problem except the front of my t-short was getting cold and wet. That was triggering off my chest aches.


  I would have liked to do more - there is plenty to do - but I felt that an hour was quite enough on a cold grey day. What you can't see is that I planted seed potatoes for another crop this year. They were what had been left in the ground from last year, and I was quite surprised to see that some were in excellent condition. I have a theory that may have some validity, and it is that those potatoes still in the ground, although moved to give a (hopefully) better spacing between the plants, know exactly when to start growing because they will, in effect, be self seeded and growing naturally. I don't need to worry about when they should be planted because they have don it themselves.
  Having not really been out in the garden for a long time, I was surprised to see this flower in bloom. I could see something red from the kitchen window, but I never realised it was a full flower. Last year I couldn't remember the name of what I had planted there, and Angela said it was a Campulana (her spelling as I remember it). I have now reason to believe it is an Anemone. I will have to take extra care when weeding here if these flowers survived winter, and are gearing up for another colourful display this year.
  My biggest surprise was seeing these dried out chillies clinging to the plant they grew on. I did plant some chilli seeds last year, but I didn't think they grew. I thought what came up in the plant pot was just weeds. I am amazed I could have missed any bright red chillies, but evidently I did. One possibility was that they never ripened, and stayed green. If that is the case then maybe there are no viable seeds in these pods. I hope they are viable because I want to plant them in pots that I will place on the front windowsills. They will get maximum sunshine and warmth there, and so potentially I could get a good crop of chillies unless they are all stolen.

  After my gardening I cleaned up, and had a nice rest before the other highlight of the day. At about 2pm, approximately in the middle of the estimated one hour window, my second beer delivery arrived. I couldn't really remembered what it was that I ordered, but I knew it was one of the cheaper selections. It was possible made up of odds and ends, but it seemed a good selection of beers made in Manchester. It even came with another small beer tasting glass which was decorated with stuff and the Beer Hunter logo. I have more than enough glasses - more than I have places to keep them on display, but I guess it added a bit of value to the selection.

  Once I had taken the beer in, and opened the box to see what I had bought, I did very little for the rest of the day. I had what I thought was a light lunch, and rested for a bit before phoning Sue who had a technical query for me. It was about rotating pictures. I just said that most image viewing apps on phones and PCs have the facility to rotate picures, but I had no idea what her Mac computer, or iPhone could actually do. She seemed happy with that, and then started gassing 10 to the dozen until I had to forcibly end the call so I could cook my dinner.

  Apart from the fat content, which is typical for lamb, it was theoretically a healthy meal. It was just stewed, dice lamb with tenderstem broccoli and pak choi. The sugar content should have been so negligible that I treated myself to 4 squares of reduced sugar chocolate as a dessert.  I ate it while watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and then went on to watch Star Trek: Enterprise. I didn't finish watching the latter because it was the series when it suddenly turned into a serial instead of series (or vice versa). Until then each episode was a stand alone story, but then it became one long story about hunting alien invaders and weird time travel and paradoxes. It was something tried on Star Trek: Voyager, although not so intensely, but it still spoiled it. It spoiled Star Trek: Enterprise to the point that it lost my interest.

  After the hard work I did in the garden I expected to get a great night's sleep, but while it may have finished good, it didn't start that way. It was one of those nights when I found it impossible to get comfortable. No matter how I tried to lay in bed something hurt. It could be an ear lobe, a finger, a toe, a muscle, a something else,  and sometimes it hurt very mildly and sometimes worse. None of the pain was bad, but adequately bad enough to distract from sleep.

  At about 9.20pm I was just about asleep when my phone rang. It was the man who describes himself as an electronics engineer, but in the real world would be classified as a labourer - aka Lee. The man with the expensive test equipment wanted my advise about his American style (gross !) fridge freezer that was blowing circuit breakers after he defrosted it. It seemed pretty obvious to me that if he looked hard enough he would find some electrics flooded with water.  It sound to me that any "engineer" worth his salt could used his expensive test equipment to find the fault, but sadly he must have been sick the day they handed out logic to his embryonic brain.

  Having finished that call I started to try and relax again, and hoped to get back to sleep quickly. Fat chance ! 20 minutes later an email came through from my sister. She is keen to hear about my current health, and to exchange gossip. Being an email I could quickly scan through it, and then leave it to deal with later (probably a job for today). It was probably not as long as it felt before I finally got to sleep.

  I probably slept fairly well after that, and I only woke up as many times as is typical these days - generally for a wee (thanks to one of the tablets I take). Every time I woke up I was aware of one or more pains. My legs ached a bit, and maybe my arms ached a bit more than usual thanks to the weeding. I had some toothache, but curiously not in the same places. I am thinking my sensitive toothpaste is not working as well as better known brands (mine is currently a poundshop type brand !). I do seem to have been eating a lot of meats lately that get stuck between my teeth, and I often damage the gum when trying to get that gristle out. At least I hope that is all it is.....but just lately I have some worrying doubts.

  I woke up at around 5am thinking it was time to get up. That felt too early, and I managed to get back to sleep, but only for around 45 minutes. At that point I thought it really must be time to get up. It was actually a handy time because I had plans that were best done in the early morning. I felt sort of OK when I got up. I was expecting the gardening to have left a bit more of a legacy than it did, but I seemed to mostly recover from that quite quickly.

  The really negative thing was that my blood glucose had gone up to 9.1mmol/l again. With the one exception of 4 squares of "80% less sugar" low sugar chocolate, I thought I had been careful about what I ate. If it wasn't the wheat crackers that did it then I reckon I'll be on insulin before the summer. I wanted to fast until at least late lunchtime, but my stomach was really growling with hunger earlier, and I finished the last of the wheat crackers with some salami slices (maybe the latter has got a lot of hidden sugar in it - I'll check it.....No, the nutritional information has plenty bad to say about it, generally in the fat and salt departments, but the sugar is shown as negligible.

  My morning plan was to have a shower, and then go out to see if my newly activated Tesco Savings Bank card was working - it was ! I used the Tesco hole-in-the-wall next to the Tesco Express store in the high street. For the third time min my life I put on my face mask to go in and try and buy a large bottle of Tesco Special Reserve whisky, but they only had the very small looking 70cl bottles. I bought one anyway.

  Then I walked down the road, and put my face mask on again to go in Poundland. There was stuff in there that I sort of needed. Among those items was tomato and plant food. I also picked up more seeds. One of the seeds was for a particular species of Anemone, and the picture on the front was identical to the picture further up the page. I guess they are not Companulas, but Anemones.

  I did all that, plus take a few pictures of the high street while waiting for Poundland to open, and I was back here before 9am. I now have very little to do until boozing time starting in the middle of this afternoon. I will pass a lot of time reading and resting...well probably, but it is possible I might try somethings I bought last year - knee pads. I could kneel down to do the weeding where the Anenome flower is. It needs to be done caarefull if there are wanted flowers in there. At the same time I could plant the new anemone seeds there and try for a much more dense display than last year. I could do these things, but.....