It is sunny at the moment, but that will soon be reduced to sunny spells. In turn they will fade to just cloudy skies with a few random minutes of sunshine now and then. Even so, the temperature may hit 15° C. Sadly the latest revision now says it will only be 15° C for as little as one hour now. Apart from a short period of sunny spells in the morning, most of tomorrow will be dull, and from 9pm rain is predicted. It might still reach 13° C in the afternoon. Of course if you choose the BBC (Meteogroup) forecast then there will be more sunny spells tomorrow morning, and it will rain almost non stop from midday !

  It was almost as if I was having a very delayed reaction to my 2nd Covid jab yesterday. I didn't feel good all day. It was a bit like very, very mild 'flu in some respects. I felt really creaky, although unlike with 'flu, it didn't really hurt. It was more like it seemed to need extra effort to do anything. To add to the realism I found the injection site on my arm seemed to gently hurt. The only trouble was that it was the site of my 1st injection on the right arm. It took an hour or so for the injection site of the 2nd jab, on my left arm to catch up. Then the pain just faded away in such a manner that I didn't realise it was happening until it had happened.

  Through all that, and feeling cold from time to time, I never had anything near a fever, although in the early evening my temperature did rise to within 0.6° C of normal ! That might have been because I took my temperature a bit too soon after eating hot food. The good thing is that the sleepiness that had plagued me the day before, and for some of yesterday morning, seemed to fade away as well, but even when not feeling sleepy I hardly felt dynamic !

  It was not that after lunchtime that I started to be productive. Earlier on I had fanciful ideas about doing some painting (a door and/or a window frame), but I couldn't find the inspiration for that. What I did do was a lot of video editing. It must have been over a month ago that I digitised the tape that Sue brought over of the gig in The Rutland Arms* from 1997. I did a quick and easy copy of it to a DVD, but it was my intention to make a "proper" DVD of the gig. That is what I started yesterday.

* Until yesterday I kept calling The Rutland Arms The Rutland Tavern. It was only when looking for old pictures of it that I realised my mistake. The best picture I found was not that great, but good enough for the menu of the DVD.

  It took many hours, and I ended up with Repetitive Strain Injury in my right wrist from all the mouse operations I had to do to while preparing the video. The first thing was to try and correct the colour temperature of the recording. It looked like the camcorder used did not compensate for the tungsten  lighting used in the pub. It was all a bit variable, but I think I got most of it looking more naturally coloured. The next thing was to increase the volume. The digitiser unit I used to digitise the VHS tape was probably set a bit low. The good thing is that the camcorder itself managed to cope with all but the very loudest bits of the gig.

  The other thing I did was to expand the size of the picture to better fill a 16:9 widescreen display. It resulted in the top and bottom of the picture being cropped off, but the top was mostly just ceiling, and the bottom was the top of a table with beer glasses on it. The really long bit was saving each song as a separate video file. That posed a slight problem. Ideally each track should continue on from the last, but the start of some songs were clipped, and sometimes there were vague out of focus shots of the floor, or other things, between songs. I judged the best thing was a quick fade to black at the end of the each song (plus a little applause), and then a fast fade from black at the start of the next song. On the DVD there will be a choice of playing each song, one after another, or just one song from a menu.

  I partly paused what I was doing when I had my dinner, and watched some TV, but I was still editing away during commercial breaks and stuff. My dinner was chicken wings - both grilled and barbecue flavours, from my Saturday night takeaway. They were nice, although I suspect the barbecue sauce used on half of them contained more sugar than I would have liked. I had a dessert after those wings. Aldi had finally found a couple of tubs of the low calorie/sugar salted caramel ice cream (possibly from the very back of their store room freezers). It appeared to have shrunk a bit, but was still delicious.

  By the time I had cut and saved all the songs from the gig my right wrist was feeling very sore. Other bits of me felt slightly sore too. I couldn't get comfortable when I went to bed, and I had a lousy sleep. It felt like I was asleep for half the night. I even resorted to painkillers at midnight. They helped, but with hindsight I think Ibuprofen might have worked better than the Paracetamol that I took. The best sleep I probably got was the last 2 hours before I woke up at around 6.30am.

  Since then I have done the usual morning routine. That included checking my blood glucose. The good news is that it was down to 8.7mmol/l from 8.9mmol/l yesterday morning. Oh well, at least it is a step in the right direction, and probably a good result after day of eating a few things with medium to high sugar content. It feels like a lot more sleep would be nice, but I don't feel that bad now I've had a shower and washed my hair. On the other hand "not bad" is a world of difference from feeling good !

  It is about now when I should have a fair idea, or better, of what I am doing today. This afternoon is going to be warm, and that should mean I would go for a walk, but I doubt that is going to happen. There is one good excuse to stay in, and that is that I think my glucose test strips, ordered via Amazon, may arrive some time today. They are being delivered by Hermes, and their parcel tracking information is sparse at best.


 Apparently at 08:35 this morning my parcel was "On it's way to the courier". I'm not exactly sure what that means, but it seems feasible that my parcel might be delivered today sometime, and that seems to be a good enough excuse to stay in. It also means I should probably try and stay awake in case I miss the courier, but I rather doubt that will happen.

   I'll probably spend some time today designing the DVD artwork - including the the sleeve for the DVD case. In fact a couple of designs for either a proper DVD case, or just a CD jewel case. The other thing I ought to do is to try and be very careful about what I eat today. That is going to be tricky if I start getting bored at any point !