At around 4am this morning the temperature, according to the radio sensor on the spare bedroom outside windowsill, was only a few tenths of a degree above 10° C, and according to the latest revision to the forecast, the temperature today will only rise to 15° C ! With the afternoon predicted to be very wet, today is not going to be a nice day. Today's rain will continue during the night until 5am tomorrow, although by then it may just be light rain. By 7am the temperature may be as low as 10° C and by mid afternoon it may be around 15° C. However the low temperature could be slightly tempered by the afternoon featuring sunny spells. I know that the forecast for tomorrow could just be mild fantasy, and for any day after that it would be complete fiction when it comes to any meaningful predictions, but if if those forecast do predict the trend, rather than actual details, we are in for a rough week ahead.

  For certain values of "not bad", yesterday wasn't so bad a day. It wasn't exciting by any means, but I seemed to make some use of the day in a slightly productive day. I had been to Aldi before I started writing yesterday, and I can't think of anything else to add to that. The next thing of note was to hand wash a couple of t-shirts and some underwear (about 5 pairs of underpants). Although I had started the first step, soaking in detergent, before the morning was over, it was early afternoon before I had that washing on the line.

  For much of the morning, when I wasn't shopping or writing, which really only left a few spare hours, I was in a very lazy mood, and did little except quietly read while laying on my bed. It might have been midday when we had the first sunny spells, and decided I had better pull my finger out and get that washing finished. Of course as soon as I started the sky clouded over, and it looked like there could be more torrential rain. There was no rain, and by the time I was ready to hang the washing on the line the sun was out again.

  The sun didn't stay out all the time, but there was a fair few sunny spells, and it never did get seriously grey again until sunset. It was the wind that did the biggest job of drying my clothes. I brought them in just before I had my dinner at 6pm. They were mostly dry, and at a pinch I could have worn them, but I hung them on a clothes horse in the dining room to dry. I didn't use any heat, and nor did I use a fan to help the drying. This morning the odd corner still felt a tiny bit damp, although it was more like a cold feeling than actually wet. I've hung the t-shirts on hangers now, along with all my other t-shirts, and they should be fine.

  The only other thing that took up an hour or two of my time was to continue one of those jobs that it seems will never be finished. On this occasion it wasn't cataloguing all my train photos on the spread sheet, but trying to get all my mp3 files onto one hard disk to make making back up copies easier. I do seem to have accumulated an awful lot of mp3 files in the last 25 (?) years. Once upon a time they would fit on a couple of floppy disks, but now I have several gigabytes of them.

  To make matters worse I have a lot of duplicates. Once upon a time, when disk space was at a premium, they were copied at low bit rate, and some mp3 ripper programs had pretty poor quality codecs to convert to mp3. One of the thing that is slowing down the making of my "master collection" is deciding whether early rips are better than later, (hopefully) better quality rips. I can then delete the bad version. The other thing that makes it slow is that these mo3 files are spread across 5 or 6 hard drives, or stored in silly folders on my current or previous hard disks. I am now finding many exact duplicates, and teasing those out is another reason why what started as a simple task is anything but !

  Despite buying delicious food in the morning, I seemed not to eat much after my slightly late breakfast of some grilled haddock in breadcrumbs. I can't believe it's true, but I can't remember hardly any snacking until it was dinnertime, and obviously I didn't need any snacks. My dinner was grilled sausages grilled on top of  slices of leek. I had that leek in the fridge for some time, and it was starting to deteriorate. Once I cut both ends off, and stripped the outer skin, it was perfect.

  There was one main problem with that dinner - I seemed to be burping grilled leek flavour for most of the evening. I shouldn't have needed anything after that dinner, but watching TV that doesn't fully capture my attention made me want something to nibble on. I remembered I had an opened packet of sugar free chocolate biscuits in the cupboard. I thought there was only three in there, but when I looked there was 6 or 7. I scoffed the lot !

  Last night, in one particular respect, was good - it was cool enough to make sleeping under the duvet comfortable. Overall I seemed to sleep OK last night. I still woke up periodically for a pee, and at least once for no apparent reason at all. The only bit of dream I can remember is now very blurry, but I remember it was about working with some very high voltages, 100,000 volts !!, but it was quite low current. It was enough for the arcs to burn, but not electrocute. I'm not sure if I should say it was a scary dream, but it was a dream where I am sure I was being very careful.

  The only other thing of note about my sleep was that from time to time I would check the outside temperature on my radio linked thermometer. The sensor sits on the windowsill outside the spare bedroom. It came very close to 10° C. The lowest I saw was probably at about 4am when it was 10.4° C. It is no surprise that I was feeling very comfortable under the duvet last night. At 5am (or was it 6am) I turned the heater on, and that made getting up much more comfortable.

  To my great annoyance my blood glucose had shot up to 9.7mmol/l this morning. I think the leek contributed some of the sugar, but it was the "Zer-oh", sugar free chocolate biscuits that must have been most blameworthy. I knew they contained rather more sugar than the Zero implied by the name, and I should have taken better care, but with so few left in the packet I just scoffed the lot to get rid of them.

  Despite the high blood glucose, I feel moderately OK this morning. My legs feel less stiff than some days, and after my better sleep I don't feel tired. On the other hand I don't feel very dynamic today. That is probably to do with the lousy weather predicted for this afternoon (and maybe earlier). It is possible I might still go for a short walk later this morning, but no further than a cash machine, although there is no urgency about it.

  The highlight of the day is something I need to stay in for. It will be the delivery of a big box of beer by DHL. They have suggested it should be delivered at rough 1pm plus or minus half an hour. I think I placed the order no later than Sunday evening, and to have it delivered today is rather remarkable. If it is all in order when it arrives I will be most impressed.
  Also impressive is my giant sunflower. It seems to be fully open, and has been visited my numerous bees. It is possible I will get a good crop of seeds. On the left of the picture can be seen the stem of another sunflower. It may never flower now the weather is turning nasty, but it continues to grow. Unfortunately it got battered by the torrential rain yesterday morning, but I have tied it up, and it seems OK. It is now taller than me, and at this rate it will be looking over the 6ft fence panel in another day or two.
  My basil plants, grown from sprigs of basil from Tesco, are growing well, but something is eating the leaves. I can't see what it is, but there is something I can see in this picture. I think it is just a bit of brown leaf, but it does look a bit like a slug, I think I need to give this pot a better inspection. It is usually protected from flying insects because I have used a big plastic bag to put it in it's own "poly- tent".