At some point in the night the skies cleared, and the temperature dropped enough for a frost this morning. I saw 1.7° C on my garden thermometer when the forecast was saying it should be 3° C at 8am. The latest revision to the forecast makes one small change. The sunshine will give way to sunny spells at 2pm, and those will finish after 6pm. The temperature is still predicted to rise to 12° C by 3pm. Tomorrow may start off with sunshine, but that may reduce to sunny spells. It could cloud over by mid afternoon, but the temperature may reach 14° C.

   I believe there is an army saying in one or more of the armies of the world that says something like "hurry up and wait". That is a fair description of my day yesterday. I had got my PC up and running OK before I started writing yesterday, but after writing here I did more PC related work. I spent some time copying photos from various sources to replace missing or corrupt files. There may be some I have yet to discover, but I think most of my photo/picture folder on my PC is now intact again.

  Having got the photos fixed it was imperative to make a backup copy. This is where the hurry up and wait applies...well, almost. There wasn't much of a hurry up as I set up Lucky Backup (a Linux and Windows program for doing back ups) to update an earlier backup that was clean, but of the two backup disks it was the one I hadn't updated at all this year. Sadly most file corruption was in photos taken in January this year. Once the backup started it was time to wait.

  Once the pictures/photo collection was backed up it was time for an even slower task. I want to see how my second Dell Optiplex PC would work with a 3TB hard disk in it instead of a solid state drive for the system, and a "spinning rust" conventional hard disk for the /home directory/folder. To do that I had to make a copy of all the data on the /home partition. This time I didn't need to clone it because I am intending to do a fresh system installation. It was no faster than cloning, and maybe it was slightly slower in total, but at least I could continue to use the PC during the copying process.

  One of the curious things about yesterday was that with all the waiting for copying to happen on my PC I didn't seem to have a lot of time for resting 'n' reading. To clarify, that reading was reading a book. I did read a fair bit from the internet as a started to catch up on technology news on https://www.theregister.com/. It is one of those websites that goes quiet for sometimes long periods, and then there is a deluge of new stories. I must admit that some of the news stories are about stuff that I no longer understand - stuff like cloud storage, data centres, and terribly complicated web site stuff. However , it is worth it for their snarky stuff, and their coverage of space related events.

  After getting a super high blood glucose reading, yesterday morning, I knew I had to try and fast for a lot of yesterday. Unfortunately it was another occasion when my stomach was really growling by 1pm, and a) I was at home, and b) there was nothing exciting to distract me. I had to give in fasting, but at least I took the sensible option, and calmed my stomach with a couple of cans of "chunky" minted lamb and vegetables. It has less sugar in it than Heinz "no added sugar" soups !

  Later in the afternoon I had some cheese to nibble on, but eventually it was dinner time, and I had a nice low everything dinner. It could be called a beef and red cabbage casserole. It was diced lean beef cooked in beef stock with added chilli and dark soy sauce (the latter does contain sugar, but I only used a small amount of it). Once the beef was mostly cooked I added rather a lot of red cabbage, and zapped it in the microwave for another 10 minutes (just enough to soften the hard stem of the cabbage).

  A little later I did have a sort of supper of a lump of cheese and some crinkle cut pickled gherkins. Provided it's not a version where they add a load of sugar to the vinegar, those gherkins are almost zero sugar. Of course the cheese, all the cheese I ate yesterday, will clog my arteries with cholesterol, but at least it won't significantly increase my blood glucose level - at least not directly. Of course it would make me fatter, and that increases Insulin resistance, but you can't win every time.
  Last night, before going to bed, I tried some Vanilla Zero Sugar Coca Cola with Smirnoff vodka. It wasn't the nectar of the Gods, but it was quite pleasant. I think I had three large ones before going to bed. I didn't rush to bed last night because there were a few good things on TV. On BBC4 there was a programme about punk music. It was actually just a collection of clips of punk bands on stage - many on The Old Grey Whistle Test stage.

  After that BBC4 had a couple of programmes looking back to 1990. It mostly featured clips from Top Of The Pop, and the programme description strongly suggested it would feature a lot, and possibly entirely a load of disco crap. Time to turn over to Sky Arts who had a documentary about the making of Cream's "Disraeli Gears" album. That was pretty interesting, although some of the video clips of them performing live were pretty ragged. Then again it is probably marvellous that they exist at all.

  Last night's sleep was another one where huge chunks of time seemed to pass with no awareness of it. I hadn't even realised I had gone to sleep when I obviously woke up and saw it was nearly 1am. I went for a wee, and once I got back into bed I just couldn't seem to get to sleep...or so I thought...and then it was 4am ! I can only remember bits of one dream, although the changes in scenery would strongly suggest it was more than one dream. I can vaguely remember I was visiting an old friend in his, at the time, big house. The house got immensely bigger when I needed to use the toilet. The toilet was up a flight of stairs, and along a long corridor. Once through the door marked toilet I found there were 30 stalls plus many urinals and wash basins. It was bigger than the biggest pub toilets !

  I think I woke up as soon as I selected a place to pee because I thought I wanted to pee back in the real world. I did, but it was only a half hearted pee, and hardly desperate.  I can't remember if I got up then, or if I went back to bed for another hours sleep. I think I probably did get a bit of sleep after it because I can't remember it being light when I went for that small pee, and it was light when I woke up again....but it all seems so dreamlike now, almost 4 hours later.

  The first thing I did when I got up was to go to the toilet because at that time I needed to - number ones and twos ! That was all fine and dandy because I wanted to give my hand a good scrub to get rid of any sweat of hand cream - both can cause inaccuracies when checking my blood glucose. I was very happy to find my blood glucose had come right down from above the danger line to just 7.5mmol/l -  was spot on my self set target.

  While I still need to be careful about what I eat today, I don't need to go to extremes. It also means I don't need to go for a long walk today, but I probably will. It won't reach 12° C (still shown as the maximum today in the latest revision to the forecast) until 3pm, but even 9° C, which it still might be at midday, might feel OK if I can keep in the strong sunshine. Maybe I might wait until my stomach starts growling before going out, or maybe I might not go out at all, and finally do some work in the garden today. I guess I'll decide on the spur of the moment.