It's a bit dull now, but by 11am it is predicted to be exceedingly dull with initially light rain, and then heavy rain for a few hours from midday. The actual times the rain will be heavy, and when it will be light, are pure speculation, and the rain will make up it's own mind without consulting the forecasters. What does seem very likely is that from sometime around 11am, until around 7pm, it is going to be wet. It is also going to be cold. The latest revision to the forecast says the highest temperature today is about now, when it is 6° C, but will fall to just 5° C once the rain starts. It will stay 5° C for the rest of the day. by 4am tomorrow morning it will be down to 3° C, but by 4pm it could be 9° C. Tomorrow is going to be dull with a small chance of rain in the late afternoon.

  I'm trying to think of any highlights from yesterday, and my mind is a blank. That is probably because not a lot happened. That is not to say I had a completely sedentary day. One thing I did was more laundry, and this time it was triggered by finding an ancient Hovis tea towel at the back of a kitchen drawer. It seemed to smell unpleasant after spending possibly 30 years in a drawer full of all sorts of odds and ends - and probably quite a few woodlice who probably snoozed in that drawer after they had finished munching on my old, decaying sink supporting cupboard until it was replaced.

  It seemed the perfect time to wash it, along with the tea towel and hand towel I had been using in the kitchen, plus the hand towel from the bathroom. I have been trying to wash the hand and tea towel from the kitchen more frequently than I used to. The idea being that some stains may become less permanent with frequent washing - particularly stains from fats and grease.

  It is too late for that Hovis tea towel. It smells fresh now, but it is evident it has had too many run ins with curry, and was machine washed with far too many black t-shirts in the distant past.  I may try washing it with some stain remover/whitener some time. If I could get it looking a bit better it could almost be used as a picture on the wall.

  My attempt to be very careful with what, and how much I ate, started to unravel yesterday. I had an idea for something to do that needed a lot of energy - not physical energy, but something like mental/psychic energy. I came to the stupid idea that I would take a packet of fish fingers out of the freezer, cook, and eat the whole lot. At least I ate them with silverskin pickled onions rather than drowning them with sweet tomato sauce.
  I was just starting my next little project when there was the sound of something coming through the latter box. It was a CD I had ordered. It was written, played, and produced by Matt Donovan. He is a drummer who has played for Chain, and many other bands I used to see (and hopefully will again once Covid restrictions are fully lifted). It seemed worth stopping everything to listen to it.

 It is pleasant enough, but no song has a hook that lodges in the ear. Some songs seemed inspired by Pink Floyd's earlier stuff. There was hints of Hawkwind in there, as well as Gary Numan. The last track made me think of Kraftwerk, and is possibly the strongest track for me. The whole CD is still in my playlist, and was probably played again in the early hours of this morning. It could be many hours, maybe half a day before it comes around again, but I might move it forward at some opportune time.

  The main thing I did yesterday was quite time consuming, which was good because I had a lot of spare time, and it was also the sort of thing that allows time to pass unnoticed. It was to get a little mini PC working as mostly a media player for the dining room. It may only be an interim solution because I concluded that the fan noise from it disturbs the peace, but at least it is working OK now.

  The mini PC is based upon an Intel ready made mini PCB with an "Atom" processor soldered to it. If it has one fault it is that it only has one RAM slot, and the biggest stick of RAM I had to put in it was just 2GB. For something like Windows XP that would be quite sufficient - except that the Windows page file (equivalent in some ways to a Linux swap file) would still wear out the solid state hard disk I fitted yesterday.

  I installed the 32 bit edition of Linux Mint 17.2, XFCE, edition, and I installed it without a swap file. It is an old version of Linux Mint, but a long term support version that still has a month or two of support left. It installed with no problems, and then there was a 20 minute wait while it updated itself (Windows 10 would have taken 6 or 7 hours, maybe more, and it would probably rebooted 5 times). While it updated it was happily playing music without a single hiccup.

  There is not enough memory in it to do any heavy stuff - without a swap file it would just choke, and possibly die - but for playing mp3 files, small videos and some less demanding web pages it is ideal. As I said above, it's biggest downfall is the fan noise. Being very small (about 3 inches high by 8 inches wide and 12 inches deep) it has to use small fans, and they always whine compared to bigger fans. For light use I could probably get away with disconnecting the case fan, and that is probably the noisiest fan in the box. I may try that today.

  My dinner turned out to be interesting in more ways than one. It was grilled skinless chicken thigh with some raw vegetables to simulate a sort of salad. There was red cabbage, a bell pepper, and some sliced leek. I dressed the pseudo salad with Aldi ready made balsamic vinegar and oil dressing. It was nice, but not as good as a real chicken shish kebab. The only problem was that I took a chance on the chicken. It was past it's use by date, and starting to smell. I washed it before grilling it, and it stopped smelling, and evidently it didn't give me any sort of stomach upset.

  The other interesting thing came about because of that chicken. There were still two chicken thighs left in the pack, and I didn't want to keep them any longer. I decided I would give them to the foxes. I left them in the garden, and tried to keep an eye on them. Earlier in the day I had done one other very quick job. I had cleaned the plastic dome of my garden camera, and it improved the picture a lot - particularly at night. I never did see the chicken being eaten, but quite late last night I observed as many as 5 fox cubs gambolling near the earth entrance in my back garden.

  I had another late night last night, and I can dump the blame on Lee for calling me at gone 9pm last night. As usual he wanted help. This time he wanted help deleting his Facebook account - for the second time. I don't know if he is bored with it because his posts and comments rarely get any reaction, or if he is hiding from someone again. Anyway, I couldn't be bothered to get up and try and help him through the Facebook menu structure, but I did make him read out everything he saw, and interpret it for him because he seems unable to understand his native language. I have no idea if he did finally delete his facebook profile, but it seemed like he had. He finally hung up at around 11pm, and I tried to go to sleep.

  Last night was one of those nights that seemed like I wasn't sleeping well, and yet huge chunks of hours seemed to pass without me noticing. I evidently got a lot more sleep than it seemed I was getting when I was awake for a very long feeling 5 minutes in the small hours of the night. I think I can only remember part of one dream. I was in a house with very tall windows. I am sure it wasn't supposed to be my house, but I seemed to feel at home there. The roof was being replaced on the house, and it was being done just by one builder working on his own. After a lot of banging one whole side of the roof came falling down past those big tall windows. It seemed very dramatic, but apparently all part of the plan !

  I woke up a little too early to get up, but only by 15 to 20 minutes. It was one of those occasions where I turned over with the intention of "just 5 minutes more". Nearly an hour later I woke up again. I guess I needed that extra sleep. I felt reasonably OK when I got out of bed. I had no special aches and pains - just the usual creaks and groans from assorted joints. I was keen to check my blood glucose level. I expected it to have have gone up after that big lunch, and also the previously no mentioned tub of low calorie/sugar ice cream I had for dessert after my dinner. It had gone up from 7.9mmol/l to 8.3mmol/l. That was less than my worst fears, but still enough to try and take some action today to avoid it going up much further.

  I have two minor plans for today, and one major plan. The first of the minor plans is to have a shower and wash my hair. There didn't seem to be any point in doing that yesterday, and this I must be rather smelly. That is an excellent reason to have that shower, and wash my hair this morning. The second minor plan is to check, and then, assuming all is well, set up my two trail cameras in tee garden to try and get some nice footage of the fox cubs tonight.

  The major plan for today is for another boozing session with Jodie. She is unable to visit the people she normally sees on a Saturday night, and so she is dumping herself on me today instead of Sunday. With rain expected for much of the afternoon and evening, I wouldn't be doing anything anyway. Sunday should be dry, and so it might be possible that I will do something then, but it is also going to be cold, so maybe not.