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August 2021 September 2021

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Thursday 23rd September 2021
09:00 BST

  Yesterday was another lovely day - sunny and warm at all the times that mattered, which was all the daylight hours ! In direct sunlight, wearing a black t-shirt, it felt very warm indeed, but I don't think the air temperature was above the 22° C predicted in the forecast.
less sunshine than recent days
  This morning has started bright and sunny, but if the forecast is correct we will soon lose the sunshine, and it may not be back until 3pm. Even then it may only be intermittent, but 6pm is shown as being full sunshine that will last until sunset. The sky will be clear overnight, but the temperature will not dip below 13° C. Tomorrow should see a return back to a very sunny day, maybe better than yesterday. The temperature should go up to 22° C. Today will only see 21° C.

   Yesterday was a nice day. It was obviously helped by the nice sunshine. It seemed I had a busy morning. I described the first bit of it yesterday morning - getting some hand washed laundry on the washing line before 9am, and then having the full wet shave, shampoo and conditioner, and finally a shower. It too a little time to cool down after that. In fact I gave a it a full hour before going out to buy some stuff from Tesco.

  I came home with quite a lot of stuff from Tesco. My primary purchase was of a bottle of Jameson's orange flavoured whiskey. I only had a very small taster when I got home, but it confirmed it was rather nice. If there was one thing against it, it was that it was only 30%. As such it should have been 3/4 the price of typical whiskey, but was actually slightly more expensive (but only £18 when bought with Clubcard discount).

 I steered well clear of the bread section of Tesco. I think I have experimented with bread rolls enough now - only the plain wholemeal "scotch rolls" are made without sugar, and it seems they don't have them very frequently. The similar looking wholeseed rolls do have sugar in them ! I did buy another 8 cans of soup, and I discovered that they do have bird seed at the other end of the isle where I looked for it last time. I bought a big bag of bird seed, and a bag of bird peanuts.

  I was feeling hot and sticky again after lugging that lot home (I had barely cooled off after my hot shower, and the heat from the hair dryer), and I put my plan to go out again on hold for a while to allow time to cool off again. I left in just enough time to walk through the park to get to The Jolly Farmers where I met Angela. I didn't know in advance that she would be able to meet there, but I sent her a text message about 10 minutes before her lunch break to say I would be there.
like a
                                      summers day
  This was the view to the north as I walked through the park. It could have been a summers day. The sky was blue, the light was bright, the shadows deep, and it was deliciously warm.

  I should have given Angela a bit more warning because she was a little later than usual (although probably less than 10 minutes later). It was nice to see Angela again, but there didn't seem to be the warmth between us that there was. It was more like meeting an ordinary friend instead of a very special friend. Maybe it was just me that has changed. It's hard to tell. Anyway, we had out usual two drinks, and spent some of the time talking about film stars from some rather old films. Most would have been Ealing comedies or Carry On films.

  I have to admit that Angela was enjoying our meeting more than I thought because she was in no rush to get back to work on time. She was probably nearly 15 minutes late. I saw her to the outer door of her office, and then I debated walking back through the park, or more directly home. I opted to go straight home - partly because I knew I would be needing a pee sooner or later.

  When I got home I threw caution to the wind, and ate two more items I bought from Tesco in the morning. They were two packets of instant noodles. The packets looked more exotic than usual, and it had the makers desired effect of making me think they might have been extra nice. Of course they weren't ! They were different, but no better or worse than other instant noodles.  The irony of it all was that I had eaten something not too good for me in the failed hope that the excitement would outweigh the negative aspects (the effect on my blood glucose).

  After my two bowls of noodles (I had to check both flavours, chilli and terriyaki) I lay on my bed to read. It wasn't long before I felt asleep and snoozed for maybe as long as an hour. It was 4pm when I woke up again, and it may have been because the sun had moved around, and was no longer shining through the windows and onto me. The window was open, and the breeze coming in felt a little cool. It seemed a good time to close the window to save some of the heat from earlier.

  It wasn't long to dinner time after that - after allowing time to prepare dinner. It was to be sausages with a couple of sad looking mushrooms that had been in the fridge too long, plus some tinned peas, leftovers from the previous day's dinner, and some runner beans. The latter were not nice because they were so stringy. I have a strong idea I didn't prepare them correctly. I probably should have used a sharp knife to slice off the edges and discard them. I have more of them I can experiment on for today's dinner.

  I didn't sleep well last night. It may have been because it started off badly....or did it ? I seemed to be waking up very frequently, and having difficulty getting back to sleep, but there was a clue that maybe it was actually a dream ! It all seemed real, but the clue that it probably wasn't was the idea that the battery that powered my duvet may have been flat. Obviously duvets don't use batteries. The idea probably came from the fact that one of my garden lights had gone faulty.

  When I opened that garden light up (very easy - just two screws) I found the NiCad rechargeable battery flat. It seemed that the solar cell that should charge it was not giving out enough voltage to charge it. The Nicad was just a standard AA sized cell, and I tried an ordinary alkaline cell as a replacement. It would not be charged, and would run down, but it came on in the dark, and was nice and bright. I put the rechargeable cell in a charger, and I will put that back in the lamp when the alkaline battery fails. I have a few more spare AA sized rechargeable cells that I might rotate in that garden light.

  Back to the night... After what was probably dreams about not sleeping well I felt irritated because at that point I hadn't realised that they were probably dreams. Being irritated may have spoiled the rest of my night. It seemed that every time I woke up I had to thrash around for what felt like ages before I could get back to sleep again. The only good thing is that I noticed each bit of sleep was getting progressively longer. At 6am I didn't think I could ever get back to sleep.....2 and a bit hours later I was waking up again, and think it was definitely time to get up.

  This morning my blood glucose is exactly the same as yesterday morning, 8.6mmol/l. My chances of getting the average for the month down to less than 8.5mmol/l seem to be receding fast. Oh well, in absolute terms it doesn't matter, but it would have been nice to achieve just a little better control. As usual, or so it seems, I really don't know if I feel good or bad this morning. I do know that I felt bloody creaky when I went down to feed the birds a little while ago, but felt perfectly fine coming back up the stairs.

  It is a shame that the sunshine is now starting to go into shorter and shorter sunny spells as the sky gets cloudy. I did have some very outlandish ideas of walking to the top of Blythe Hill Fields to try out my new telephoto lens and Nikon D80 camera. Maybe I might get that far. The real insanity is thinking that if that wasn't too excruciatingly hard I could go on and tackle Hilly Fields. It is possible I might not even go out, but I think I'll just take it one piece at a time...or something. 
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