Once again the forecast may have been a bit over enthusiastic about the rain this morning. There most certainly has been some rain, but I don't think I would call it very heavy rain, and it seems to have stopped now. The latest revision to the forecast only shows one thunderstorm now at 1pm with light rain either side of it. The chance of rain at 2pm is currently estimated to be as low as 30%, and at 3pm it is 40%. That often means it won't actually rain. There could be light rain for 3 hours from 6pm, but once again there is only a 30 to 40% chance of it. The only positive thing about today is that it might eventually warm up to 20° C after a very cool start to the day. Tomorrow (and Wednesday) could be dry, and may even feature a smattering of sunny spells. Temperatures could rise to 22 or 23° C.
 
  Yesterday could be described as either good or bad, and in one respect almost disastrous. I'll come to explain why further down the page. My morning was partly taken up with selecting and editing photos. It was a continuation of the work I showed yesterday. The only trouble was that I didn't manage to get through more than a third of the pictures I took of the second band I saw at Petts Wood Calling, but do have a couple of samples to show here now.
  I did my best to make these pictures look as good as a few I saw that John Bull (lens man for hire) had shown of the same band - Run For Cover. John is the photographer who suggested a few tips when I started taking my photography seriously enough to buy good DSLR cameras, and some expensive lenses (although not the mega expensive lenses I lusted after). I suspect John concentrates on just a few of his best pictures at first, and spends a lot of time using Photoshop to fiddle with them. He is good at painting out some of the background, and I am sure he strengthens the colours a lot to make the stage lighting more dramatic. I am experimenting with that with these pictures, and sometimes it works, and sometime it doesn't.
  Pushing the contrast, and colour saturation seemed to work well on this picture of Run For Cover's rhythm guitarist, Michael Chapman (not to be confused with the artist who made at least one, and probably several good albums in the 1980s. I took over 300 snaps of Run For Cover to make sure I had plenty of material to work from. Many of them were the result of burst shooting to try and capture a particular pose when it happened. I think I got a third of the way through when I had to stop to prepare for the afternoon beer session with Jodie.

  It was another frustrating session with Jodie because she was concentrating on her phone for most of the time. She has a habit of filling up her phone with pictures and videos until it is barely working. It may have been a Xmas present, but I gave her a dual ended memory thumb drive - one end for standard USB, and the other USB-C to plug into her phone. She has been through the procedure to move pictures, and other files, from the phone to the external thumb memory drive maybe a dozen times now, but she can still only do it if I prompt her how to do it.

  It is getting very tiring doing that every time. Ideally she should do it at home almost at the end of every day when she has taken loads of pictures. Her phone has a slot for a micro-SD memory card, and she has a 64GB drive in it. Ideally she should put in a fresh drive, and keep the old one safely (and preferably make a back of it on some other media), but for some inexplicable reason she is reluctant to do it.

  Jodie left late yesterday. I think she got a train just after 7pm instead of before. Once Jodie left I could tuck into my dinner. It was part three of my Chinese takeaway from Saturday night. Part two was Singapore fried rice, and I had that for breakfast. The last part was Chicken in Spicy Szechuan Sauce, and egg fried rice. It was very enjoyable, but I knew I was playing with fire eating all that rice yesterday, and I think that chicken dish probably had sugar in it !

  The poor nights sleep I had the previous night, a fair few beers and other booze, and a big dinner in me meant that I felt too tired to attempt any more photo editing yesterday evening. What I did do was to turn on my heater, just on low, because it was starting to feel rather cool last night. It didn't take all that long to raise the temperature the few degrees different between cold and comfortable. After I had a watched a compilation edition of Have I Got News For You, on Dave, my room was warm, and it was time for bed.

  I turned the heater off when I went to bed, but at around 5am (I think) I turned it back on before going back to bed again. I read for a short while before turning the light out, and falling asleep fairly quickly. I can't seem to remember much about the night, and so I assume I was probably sleeping well. In the last few hours I can remembering dreaming a lot, but my memory of it is that there was a change of scene, and people, every few seconds. The thing I can remember is a memory of a certain woman coming on to me. What I can't remember is where, how and why. All I remember is the thought that ????? is coming on to me.

  This morning it was a foregone conclusion that my blood glucose would be very high, and it was. Right into the danger area at 11.2mmol/l. It means I need to fast today until dinner time, and then only have something very safe like a couple of tins of pea and ham, or lentil soup. If I manage that I hope that my blood glucose will be down to under 10mmol/l tomorrow.

  Fasting is going to be difficult on this day when the weather is cold and miserable. It is too wet to go out for any exercise, and I have got to get the rest of my photos done today. Working in my "digital darkroom" sort of swings between exciting and boring, and it all depends on the state of the pictures I took, and if I achieve making them look very dramatic.

  I have already done one thing today, and that is to have a shower. I have started some laundry, and doing that will be a tiny bit of exercise. The only negative thing is that I will have burn more electricity to dry the stuff indoors today. It is all soaking now, and I'll get back to it later. The one thing I didn't do this morning was to go shopping in Aldi. There were two reasons for this. Although I seemed to have had a good sleep last night, I felt I was still catching up from the crap night the previous night. I fancied a lay in, and I did have a small one. That meant I couldn't get to Aldi as they opened, and before the shopper built up. I could have gone later, but then I considered it might be too much temptation when I want to fast until dinner time. Maybe I'll go tomorrow morning.