Today is going to be a bit like yesterday. There is a lot of cloud moving around above us. Some of it is thin cloud, and some heavier, and it is all random. The latest revision to the forecast has added a few more hours of sunny spells, but I don't think I am expecting them to be at the quoted times. At the moment it is very dull, and the chance of the first sunny spell happening in 23 minutes seems unlikely. It should stay dry, and the afternoon temperature should stay at 24° C for quite a few hours. Tomorrow should see the return of loads of uninterrupted sunshine, and once again it should be 24° C.
 
  Yesterday started with me feeling a bit constipated, and that put the crimp on some potential outdoor activities. I did finally "go" a little later in the morning, but it seemed to be only a token effort, and I still felt a bit uncomfortable.  I ended up having a very lazy morning, spending a lot of time just reading. Maybe the most significant thing I did was to cook, and eat a plate of fish fingers. It wasn't really congruent with my dietary ambitions, but I wanted something solid in me before the afternoon drinking session.

  There is really not much to say about the afternoon. I washed the glasses up for the Thursday boozing session, and .... err, I didn't really need to do anything else. About midday I got a text message from Michael to ask if I wanted my usual Diet Cokes from Tesco while he was shopping there. After saying yes please I think I had a short snooze. Michael arrived with the Diet Cokes at nearly 3pm, and as usual we had a bit of a gossip before he went home.

  Jodie arrived after 3.30pm, and she only had one bottle of beer with her, but it was a big one. It was a lot like a Belgium fruit beers, but made in some Eastern European country whose name I forget. It was very tart, and very fruity. I'm not sure if I liked it or not. I am fairly sure I wouldn't like to drink a lot of it. My beers were generally lager style from around the world, and except for one, which was almost unpleasant, they were pleasant, but not exciting. I suspect one or two may have contained some unbrewed sugar in them.

  Jodie almost left early, and if she didn't stop to pet every cat on the way to the station, she may have made the train she missed on Monday. Once she had left I prepared my dinner. I was not actually drunk, in a roaring sense, but I was feeling very relaxed. I contemplated ordering a takeaway, but common sense said I had a lot of lettuce type stuff in the fridge that only had a limited shelf life.

  I ended up making a salad that featured the last of the ham, and the last of the shaved Parmesan cheese - both left over from previous salads. It was sort of nice, but I yearned for more, something more substantial. I ended up opening a tin of luncheon meat. Note, I didn't say pork luncheon meat. I was dismayed when I read the tin and found it was made from mechanically recovered chicken meat. It didn't taste too bad, but the texture was unpleasant. I ate it with some pickles and French mustard. I now regard it as a mistake !

  Once again I found myself heading to bed before sunset. I think I had brushed my teeth, and was ready for sleep by 8.30pm. I didn't actually try to go to sleep then, but it was not long afterwards. I made the decision to close my bedroom window because the night air was starting to feel cold, but it left my bedroom feeling a bit stuffy. To make matters worse, my dinner had included sliced jalapeño chillies. They are not hot to eat, but usually leave me feeling a bit sweaty, and last night was no exception.

  I may have fallen asleep by 9pm, or it might have been a little later. I think I slept OK for a few hours, but just after 2am I woke up feeling uncomfortable. It was a bloaty feeling, and I spent 10 minutes in the toilet, but only managed to pass a little bit of wind. I stayed up for almost another hour, looking at stuff on the internet, hoping for some sort of movement, but eventually I gave up and went back to bed.

  For the next 3 or 4 hours I seemed to be only half asleep. I would seem to wake up for a few seconds, and then go back to sleep. Of course I could have dreamed those odd seconds. I certainly did a lot of other dreaming. One very long seeming dream was about being in a college. It was a very big building, and had a huge cafeteria in the centre of the building on the first floor. I seemed to wander around a lot, bumping into people I knew by sight, but didn't actually know who they were. A lot of my searching was for a toilet. I did find several, but they all seemed to have something wrong with them.

  The last dream I think I had was interesting in that it included real life in it. I dreamed that I had got up in the morning and learned that a gigantic earthquake in Turkey had already killed 500,000 people during the night. A memory of real life then appeared in the dream. I remembered being shaken in my bed earlier in the night. I do get very local seismic events here if some mad van driver, or even worse, a skip lorry goes over the hump at the end of the road at speed. The thump as it comes down the other side really travels through the ground, and then up to my bed springs. Maybe the memory in the dream seemed a bit worse than reality, but not that much.

  I woke up feeling dreadful this morning. I must have really been thrashing around in bed because I was almost dripping with sweat, and my whole torso seemed to ache. I think it was all a reaction to being previously constipated. It didn't happen on my first visit to the toilet, that was just for a wee, but 10 - 15 minutes later my constipation was over. I feel there is more to come, but the worst of it is over, and I am starting to feel less awful.

  I checked a few things soon after getting up. My blood glucose, the measurement I really keep my eye on now, was up to 8.3mmol/l. That is disappointing, but no real cause for concern, and I just need to be careful about what I eat (and drink) today. My temperature was it's usual early morning, and much of the day, 35.3° C - a couple of degrees less than usual human temperature. My weight was up a little, and that was annoying, although probably not surprising for a very sedentary day with added boozing. The surprising measurement was my blood pressure. It was a lot lower than expected. I don't usually check my blood pressure first thing in the morning because it is usually a bit higher than I would like, but this morning's reading would probably make my doctor very happy.

  This morning starts with waiting for a parcel delivery. I have just wasted (sort of) £109 on a "second user", ex-business laptop. I will admit that I have very little use for a laptop, but it was a case of curiosity killed the cat. It all started when I was reading an article in https://www.theregister.com/ about how working from home during Covid, and now a shortage of semiconductor parts was pushing up the prices of computers in general, and laptops in particular. It made me wonder what the prices were for ex-business laptops. For more recent laptops the prices were very high, but one company, and I think it was the one I bought my current PC from (which I am very happy with) had some that were designed for Windows 7, which doesn't seem that old in my book, and they were quite cheap.

  As I say, the one I ordered was just £109 with free postage. It is made by Dell (like my current, ex-business PC), and upon checking the specifications I note that Dell gave a choice of operating systems including Ubuntu Linux. Linux Mint, my favoured operating system is built from Ubuntu, and I have high hopes it will run beautifully on this laptop. The only problem I really anticipate is the battery being very close to end of life. That may not matter because I doubt I would be taking the laptop away from home very often, or indeed at all.....although having said that, there have been occasional times when a laptop could be useful in the pub.

  Apart from playing with the laptop, I really don't know what I am doing today. In an ideal world I would force myself out for a walk today, but we don't live in an ideal world. Besides which, I may be saving myself for tomorrow when I will be going to another street gig. This one will be just the other side of Hither Green station, and so a bit less of a walk, but still enough of a walk. The real catch is that the lastest announcement about it is that they will have a drummer, and it is going to be Angela's "lover boy". It will be nice if she is there, an if she enjoys it, but a bit awkward with him gawping at us. Oh well, I can worry about that tomorrow.