I don't think we have sacrificed enough virgins, or something, but this recent, and ongoing weather is just wrong for the middle of summer. I don't know what time the rain stopped in the early hours of the morning, or even if it did. At 8am there was some fine drizzle for a while until it faded away. The rest of today is going to be mid grey with a 10% chance of rain. That probably means it will stay dry. The latest revision to the forecast gives a 0% chance of sunshine, and it also reduced the dark cloud at 1 and 2pm to just the same mid grey as the rest of the day. It should still reach 21° C. Tomorrow will probably be a couple of degrees cooler, and will feature dark grey clouds all day. There could also be light rain at the end of the afternoon. Wednesday is looking very grim too, but that might change (finger crossed).

  I mentioned a few tasks that I might do yesterday. I am happy to say I achieved all of them. One was to wash a couple of t-shirts, and some underwear, and hang them on the line to dry. I suppose it wasn't a complete success because I lost my nerve in the afternoon, and brought that washing in while still very damp, maybe even wet, because it looked like it might rain. It didn't rain for many hours, and if I had dared to leave it out it might even have dried by late afternoon....On the other hand, it was a bit humid, and there seemed to be little wind. That was not ideal drying weather.

  My worry about guts ache came to almost nothing. You could say it was two flashes in the pan, and then all over. That meant I was comfortable to go out to Poundland - which was, as I hoped, open on a Sunday. I bought an assortment of stuff in there ranging from bird feed to hand wash. Once I got my shopping home, and packed away, I could put my feet up for a while.

  I can't remember when it was, but it may have been before I went shopping, when I checked the pictures on the trail camera watching my bird feeders. It did capture a few pictures of a great tit on the hanging feeders, but I was not happy with the picture quality. It was quite dull yesterday, and it is reflected in the quality of the pictures. I wondered if my other trail camera could do better. When I set it up I noticed that the fastest shutter speed was 1/30th Second, and that is a bit slow to capture a crisp picture of a fast moving bird.

  Yesterday's boozing session seemed sort of dull like the weather. Two of the beers we tried to drink were so horrible that most of them went down the sink. On the other hand there were a couple that were nice, or "pleasant". I think there was only one that I would be happy to drink by the pint in a pub. One beer tasted very thin. It was only 2.7%, and so I guess it would taste thin, but it was difficult to identify what it did taste of. Jodie looked up what others had said about it, and it was all very varied. I thought it tasted like very watered down ginger beer.

  With the threat of imminent rain, Jodie left a whole 10 minutes earlier than usual ! Once she had gone I tucked into my dinner. It was not originally intended to be, but it ended up as a very simple dinner of nothing more than a pack of "southern fried flavoured" chicken steaks. I don't recall having any before. They were sort of nice, and may have been nicer still if I hadn't overcooked them. They were obviously made with breast meat because they had a very dense texture (although some of that was because I cooked them in the oven for too long).

  The only thing I did after dinner was to what an old episode of QI in a slightly strange way. When I first tuned in I had missed the first 15 minutes. It was being shown on "Dave", and when it finished I tuned into "Dave-vu", and watched from the beginning until I caught up where I started watching it. After that I went to bed to read for maybe an hour before trying for sleep.

  I don't think I got to sleep as early as intended because that is when the heavy rain started. The first I realised it was raining was during that period of time when you are half asleep. I became aware of what seemed to be a scratching noise, and I pessimistically thought it was a rodent, but once I had woken up properly I realised the noise was actually rain hitting the windows. At that point it was really chucking it down !

  I think I got back to sleep, proper sleep, soon after I realised it was just rain, but I did seem to wake up a lot during the night. Initially it was for a pee (I had drunk a few pints of beer), but later on I am not sure why I seemed to keep waking up. It was probably because my bedroom had cooled down to the point where I was feeling a bit cool. At about 4am, if I remember correctly, I did put the heater on low. An hour or so later I did think it was feeling a bit too warm.

  I don't know whether to blame the weather or sleeping badly, but I seemed to really ache this morning. I expect it was a combination of both the weather and sleeping badly that resulted in that aching. Better news was that despite a few dubious choices, my blood glucose was out of the danger zone, and down to 9.5mmol/l. That is still high, and leaves no room for error today.

  One thing I did this morning was to take a couple of Paracetamols to make my walk to and from Aldi a bit more comfortable. The effect didn't fully kick in until I was returning home with my shopping. That still high blood glucose reading meant I was rather careful about what I bought in Aldi. It was a bit tricky because I didn't know if I was buying food for winter or summer ! I ended up buying salad and stuff for hot stews.

  Once my shopping was put away I checked the memory card of the second trail camera that I set up yesterday. I left it pointing a bit high to capture the action on top of the bird table, and there were a few decent/interesting pictures on it.
 No birds seem to want to take on a crow, but this pigeon felt confident to chase a magpie away.
  There was no real winner in this conflict - as can be seen better in the video below.