There was torrential rain in the early hours of today, but now most of the sky is blue, and the sun is shining. It seems it may not last beyond 11am. The afternoon could be very dull and gloomy. It will also be rather cool. The highest temperature today may only be 14° C - just 2° higher than it is now. Tomorrow is currently forecast to feature non stop sunshine all day, and the temperature could be 16° C.

  Yesterday was another very unexciting day. It seemed like going to Aldi, to get some shopping, was quite enough activity for one day. I had contemplated a walk, but quickly dismissed that, and then I contemplated something else I mentioned yesterday morning - going for a ride on some trains, and taking more pictures of trains. With the possibility of an occasional shower it did seem a more sensible suggestion if I was going to go out. I didn't !

  What I did do, apart from reading and snoozing, was to continue my quest to catalogue my better train pictures. In the case of the oldest pictures I had to use some rather poor pictures taken with my early digital cameras. Even earlier than that are pictures I took when I used a pre-digital film camera. There are not many of them because buying film, and getting it processed was a bit expensive, but mostly a hassle, and there were no options to edit the pictures once they were taken.

  The odd thing about those photos taken on 35mm film was how they could both look "soft", and yet have a wealth of detail. Some of those old negatives could probably be re-scanned in high resolution. I am not so sure that some pictures I have been dealing with weren't flatbed scanned prints rather than negatives. The negative scanner I bought a few years ago does a pretty good job at producing a digital image - so good that even microscopic bits of dust or fluff come out really well !!!!!

  It is inevitably part of ageing, but these days, and I am probably talking about the last 20 years or so, our trains are in a great state of flux. Until 1991, when the "Networker" (class 465/466) trains were introduced, it seemed like the slam door trains were a fixed point in my life. They had a few changes of paint, but from my earliest memory of trains (early 1960s) they were a constant, and then suddenly 30 years later they were starting to be replaced. According to Wikipedia the last slam door trains were withdrawn from the Southern region in 2005. Since then the replacement of trains seems to have sped up, although in some case that is an illusion, and it is the case that some trains have moved to different regions in the country where they can have a quieter life in their dotage.

  I have no idea how many hours I spent doing my train cataloguing job. It is not quite as straight forward as it may seem. For just about every train I went back to the original photo and edited it to show the train in the best light. Sometimes it still resulted in a far from perfect shot, but without a time machine it is impossible to go back to get a better shot. At my friends Kevin's suggestion I am also make a thumbnail image of each type of train to put at the top of the spreadsheet page for that train type. In many cases it is more than one thumbnail because the trains had been restyled or repainted. They are not true thumbnails because while they are small on the spreadsheet they can be clicked on to view in an external image viewer, and generally they are stored at 600x600 resolution.

  I was working on the spreadsheet from early afternoon until dinnertime, and then from something like 8pm until 9.30pm. My dinner was going to be nothing more than steamed fish on dressed salad leaves, but after eating hardly anything after my fish finger dinner it didn't seem enough, and I indulged in two cans of soup as well. One of them, an Aldi own brand chicken noodle soup, I had bought accidently thinking it was a can of lentil soup (it was on the same cardboard tray, and the labels looked similar). It was not very low in sugar, but I have to admit it was nicer that I expected.

  It was nice to get into bed after sitting in front of the PC for so long (I was also watching TV on it as well as "spreadsheeting". I didn't seem to feel that tired, and so I read until almost 11pm. The last thing I did was to reach out to grab a torch to read the thermometer. I think it said 11° C, but it's importance quickly faded when I turned over to go to sleep. I didn't feel anything odd when I reach out for that torch, but I think I may have pulled a muscle.

  When I laid on my right side I suddenly had a very irritating pain high up on the left hand side of my back. I had reached out for the torch with my left hand. What made it very irritating was that was that it was mild enough not to be noticeable if I was trying to find my usual comfortable position, but was very noticeable as I relaxed and tried to sleep. It did seem to get worse during the night, but I was able to sleep on my left.

  At 3am I took some paracetamol, and turned the heating on. As the room warmed I could partly discard the duvet (but only partly because my bedroom took a long time to warm up with the heater on low). That gave me a bit more freedom to move around, and I slept rather better after that. So much better that I slept right through my usual getting up time of 7am, and didn't wake until just after 8am.

  I woke up extra fast after I got out of bed because I noticed a message on my my mobile phone. I didn't get to read it before my doorbell was ringing. The message was to tell me one part of of a recent order, sent via DPD was about to be delivered. I quickly pulled on some trousers, and went to collect my packet from the courier. It was nothing terribly exciting, but still exciting to get it. It was just a sun hood for one of my camera lenses.

  In all the excitement I forgot about that pain in my upper back, but even now it is still there bubbling under the surface. If it was a pulled muscle then it is no worry, and it will soon fade away. There is one other possibility that is not so good. I can't actually work out where the centre of the pain is, but I know that it extends to my side. That is where people get pains from kidney stones. They are usually agonising, but I am unsure if they start that way. If this pain does not fade away I might get concerned that it might be more than a pulled muscle.

 When I finally got around to checking my blood glucose I was a bit disappointed because it seemed to be a bit high. It wasn't until I did a double take that I realised it wasn't the 7.5mmol/l that I am aiming for, but 8.4mmol/l, which was this morning's reading was under my typical monthly average of 8.5mmol/l. I still think I need a string of lower readings if I am ever to get the average down after this month's disastrous start.

  I am constrained about what I do today for two reasons. The most obvious one is the weather. The latest revision to the forecast still says that this afternoon is going to be very dull and gloomy, but now they have added a couple of hours of light rain into the mix. It is as if they don't want me to go out. I probably will go out to Poundland after I've had a shower and dressed properly. The other constraint today is that I am expecting the final part of my last Amazon order. It is another sunshield for a different lens, and a few spare eye cups for my Nikon cameras. (For some reason they seem to come loose easily, and I have lost a couple in the past). That delivery is being made my Amazon themselves, and the chances of it arriving before 5pm are slim, but one in a while they surprise me by coming much earlier.