Yesterday the BBC (Meteogroup) weather forecast was predicting a lot of rain for today, but the Met Office predicted a lot less. This morning they have both changed sides. The BBC says there will be some rain, but also a few sunny spells. The Met Office, as in the screenshot above, are predicting a really wet day today. At the moment it is probably a bit brighter than forecast, and about 2 hours ago there was some thin sunshine peeping over the horizon.

  The weather is obviously in a high state of flux. Since first checking the weather forecasts the two forecasters have switched their predictions again. The Met Office still says it will be very dull, but the deluge shown in the screenshot above is now reduced to just a few scattered hours of light rain with the first shower starting at 10am. The BBC is now predicting a total deluge, also starting at around 10am, but continuing with some periods of heavy rain until well after sunset. Both forecasters says the maximum temperature will be 11° C. The BBC say all afternoon, but the Met Office say it will only reach 11° C for  couple of hours late in the afternoon. Tomorrow may be bright and 11° C, or it may be very dull, and 11° C depending on which forecaster comes closest to reality.

  The big unknown yesterday was what time my parcel would arrive, or even if it would arrive yesterday. It was two packs of glucose test strips. I still have about a weeks supply left of the last pack, and so I was not desperately waiting for the new packs, but the uncertainty was annoying. There is always the fear that if you do anything else you could miss the delivery, and that could mean all sorts of aggro. It was all resolved at about 3pm when the man from Hermes handed me my parcel.

  The day before yesterday I wasn't feeling good, and the obvious thing to blame was a side effect from my 2nd Covid jab last Friday. I'm not so sure if it was that, but it makes an excellent scapegoat. Yesterday I seemed to feel a lot better. Maybe I just needed all the rest I got the day before. It was a shame the rest didn't include the night when I was supposed to be sleeping, but even with an apparent lack of sleep, I did feel fairly OK for a lot of yesterday. I'm not so sure that I felt good enough to do anything dynamic, but I did feel good enough for most of the time - enough not to feel uncomfortable.

  Once again I passed a fair bit of time just reading, but I did get up to some "artistic" endeavours. That mainly took the form of configuring all the parameters for the 22 track DVD featuring the 22 songs performed by the band Warehouse in 1997. The DVD authoring program I was using is very straightforward to use once you remember how to use it (!), but it does lack a lot of flexibility when it comes to disk menu options.

  What I really wanted was a very simple root menu on the DVD showing just two items - "Play All" and "Songs Selection". The latter would take you to a sub menu where you could select a single song to play. Sadly the program does not have the ability to generate sub menus...at least I don't think it has, but on reflection there was an option I didn't understand. Maybe I should have experimented more.

  It took three goes before I was happy (or relatively happy) with my disk layout. It is lucky I have a fair stock of blank DVD-R disks from the days when they were very cheap. I think they are comparatively expensive again now.  The next step was to design a Lightscribe label. That is just graphic editing with the proviso that Lightscribe is basically a very limited greyscale. In fact it is best to treat it as just black and white with no shades of grey.

   I did what I hoped was a good design, and then tried to print it. There is Lightscribe software for Linux, but it is rather old, and tricky to get working on more modern installations. That was no problem because the Windows version is easy to install, and was already installed on my dual booting laptop - except it didn't work ! I thought it used to, but maybe I was wrong. It is possible I didn't install the "drivers" software. I have just downloaded a fresh installation file, and I'll see if that gets things working today.

  I was not fully occupied to take my mind off food yesterday, and I ate a fair bit during the day - by which I mean I had a sort of breakfast and lunch. I was careful to avoid anything that contained too much sugar. I did have several "no added sugar" biscuits though. These contain almost no sugar, but they are still made from wheat, and that, being a carbohydrate, gets converted to sugar by digestive enzymes.

  My dinner was a simple casserole of diced lean beef with mushrooms and white cabbage. It also contained what was probably an excess of excruciatingly hot sauce. Last night, as I ate it, I came to the conclusion it contained both chilli and black and white pepper. I them made the stupid mistake of eating it while it was too hot. After maybe the second mouthful I started to cough, and my eyes started to stream. That made my nose run. It was a bit of a disaster, but once it cooled off a bit it was rather nice !

  I have no idea when I turned the light out to go to sleep. I read in bed for a while, and my best guess would be that I was reading until 10pm, but it could have easily been 11pm. Once I turned the light out I think I fell asleep quite quickly, and I slept OK until just gone 2am. I woke up as if I had a cold. My nose was blocked, and I was coughing. It may have been a result of the state I was in when I started my too hot dinner. There may have been a lot of mucus lurking in my sinuses or something. I decided at that point to turn the heating up because I initially felt a bit cold.

  It might have been well over half an hour before I fell asleep again, but once asleep again I seemed to sleep OK. I can recall having some dreams which seemed like they were repeating, but I can't remember anything that makes enough sense to describe. I seemed to feel fairly refreshed when I woke up at almost exactly 6am.  Apart from going for a wee, the first thing I did, as always, was to check my blood glucose. It was down from 8.7mmol/l to 8.2mmol/l. That was a nice drop, although I had hoped for a bit more. I still want to get it down to 7.5mmol/l or less.

  I feel mostly OK today, but not so good that I would be yearning to go for a walk. After seeing what the weather may be like today any lingering desire for a walk has totally evaporated. Well, almost evaporated. If I feel I can do a short walk in the dry I may go and get a little bit of shopping from the little supermarket on Catford Bridge.  There was a short period of time when I was definitely not feeling OK, and it is only subsiding now. I think that very spicy cabbage probably irritated my lower digestive tract. I have just made 4 closely spaced visits to the toilet ! I think/hope it is all over now, but....

  I have one definite plan for today, a few likelys, and a few maybes. The definite plan is to take out two bag of stuff for the recycling bin - it should be collected tomorrow. It is very likely that I will finally burn the Lightscribe label I designed. Maybe I will also design and print 2 different CD Jewel case style labels, and maybe a full DVD case label. Other than that I don't know what I will do today...err, except more reading.