It was another cold night with the temperature definitely down to 8° C around 5am, and possibly lower before that. At the moment it should be bright with showers. It is not bright, but it is dry. The latest revision to today's forecast strongly agrees with the screenshot above from 10am onwards. There will be rain, followed by rain, and then more rain after that. Much of it could be heavy rain. It is also going to be a very cool day with the afternoon being no more than 15° C apart from one hour when it might peak at 16° C. Tonight may not be as cold as last night, and tomorrow may be a degree or two warmer than today thanks to the prediction of the day featuring loads of sunny spells......maybe.

  To avoid any stress I will now reveal my Amazon delivery finally turned up at about 5pm yesterday. My whole day almost revolved around waiting for it even if I knew the earliest it could have arrived would have been 2pm (possibly even 1pm if the driver made me his very first drop off, and had floored it all the way from Dartford. The contents of that deliver was another bottle of Swedish whisky. The last one, bought a few months ago, was rather nice. Yesterday's one was from the same brewery/distillery, but had a different name. Unfortunately it tasted a bit too smoky/peaty for my palate, but maybe I can learn to love it.

  There were three things I wanted to do yesterday. One of them, continuing to catalogue my train pictures, I didn't even make a start on. The second was much more productive. I finally finished copying any mp3 files from one external hard disk to the external hard disk I am using as my master collection of files. The thing that made the process slow was that it took a long time to tease out anything that was not a duplicate.

  Once the hard disk I was copying from (actually a complete, but old backup of my /home folder in my main PC) was empty of mp3 files I formatted it to give a clean hard disk, and then copied every single file from the master mp3 archive to it as a backup. Not all those mp3 files were music. Some were recordings of radio programmes or audio books. The entire archive was over 300GB, and it took over 4 hours to copy it all. In fact I ended up going to bed, and just let it get on with it.

  The third thing I wanted to do yesterday was to try and fast as much as possible after my terribly high blood glucose reading in the morning. It was not easy to fast on what started out as a cold, wet and miserable day, and continued as being cold and bright. I could have managed a lot better if the morning had been like the afternoon, but the die was set. During the course of the day I munched through a fair amount of peanuts.

  Those peanuts took the edge off my desire to eat, but by 1pm I felt the desire for some hot food. I turned to my soup collection, and selected two cans of Tesco cream of chicken soup. It has the lowest sugar content of any soup I have ever found. It is just 0.6mg per half can. I had two cans, and for a while they warmed me up nicely. Eventually dinner time came along, and for some reason I didn't feel any more than mildly hungry. I just had two fishcakes on a deep bed of wild rocket dressed with balsamic vinaigrette. It was a rather nice dinner, and once I can get the ingredients again, I will be having it again in the future.
  This was what the sky looked like in the afternoon. It was still a bit cool, but looked lovely. If I hadn't been waiting in for my Amazon delivery it might easily have decided to go out for a short walk in that sunshine.
  This is the solar powered garden spotlight that I have mentioned not too long ago. To recap: It stopped working. I found there were just two small screws to remove to get access to the electronics inside. It seemed that the solar cells had gone faulty, and couldn't charge the AA sized rechargeable battery in it. That battery was not soldered or glued in, and it was simple to pop it out, and put a Duracell AA battery in it's place. I found that battery in the bottom of a drawer, and I had no idea if it had been used before, nor how old it was.

  The important thing is that it worked perfectly. That was over a week ago, maybe getting on for two weeks, and it still lights up once it gets dark in the garden. We are now getting nearly 12 hours of darkness at night, and for that week or two it has been alight all that time. That is rather more than I think I could expect from that battery, however there could be something good going on. It is a fact that non-rechargable batteries are in fact rechargeable to some extent, and under special conditions. They need to be charged very slowly, and charged frequently, well before they have discharged much. If in fact the solar cells are working then that battery is getting a trickle charge during the day, and not being deeply discharged at night. It will fail sooner or later, and I will fit a proper rechargeable battery, but for now that Duracell is working well.

  I could potentially have gone to a Chain gig last night, or even a punk gig in Deptford, but I was hardly tempted by either. I was in bed not long after each gig would have started, and asleep well before they had finished their first sets. It was quite good sleep, although from something like 4am I began to feel a bit cool. At 5am I turned the heater on low, and my bedroom warmed up a bit, but at 7am it still felt a bit too cool to sit around in just my underpants, and I put the heater on full for maybe an hour, but turned it back to low when I had my breakfast of a pair of kippers.

  I feel barely warm as I write this, but I don't really want to turn the heat up and increase my electricity bill too early in the Autumn. Maybe I need to put a jumper on or something. Anyway, the better news is that this morning my blood glucose is right down to 8.4mmol/l. That is not as good as, say 7.4mmol/l, as I would like it to be, but still very slightly under my typical monthly average. It seems I am back in the game again after yesterday's disaster.

  It is still not raining, but even the latest revision of the forecast says it should be, although it has changed this hour from heavy rain to light rain. It still maintains there will be heavy rain in the next hour, and it may continue through most of the afternoon. Maybe 9pm will finally be rain free. Even if some of the forecast is wrong, it can't be all wrong, and today looks very strongly like another indoor day. There is a slight chance that I might put a raincoat on and go to Tesco at some point, but mostly I think it is just me and my books and computers today.