There is no sunshine forecast for today, and some hours may be very grey, but it will be warmer than yesterday. The latest revision to the forecast, which adds a few more dark grey hours, still says this afternoon the temperature will reach 19° C, and may stay there between 2pm and 6pm. Tomorrow may be a degree cooler. The current prediction, which almost certainly wrongs, give a 30% chance of drizzle in the early morning, and the possibility of some sunny spells in the late afternoon. Other than that, it will just be grey.

  Much of yesterday could be described as rather good, and certainly better the the preceding few days. It turned that it was not perfect, and in fact it didn't end well. The first bit of productivity was to wash a single t-shirt, and some underwear. This was to take advantage of the sunshine. It would have been better if I had a few more things to add to that wash, but I did everything in the dirty laundry basket. I left it until almost 6pm to bring the washing in off the line, and while it felt cool, it did seem to feel dry.

  It must have been around midday when I went out on a special quest. I walked through the park to the hospital. I wanted to enquire about the so called booster shot of Covid vaccine. It is a single shot of Pfizer vaccine for those of use who had the Astra Zenica vaccine in the spring. The vaccine centre was closed for vaccinations yesterday, but the help desk was still staffed. I spoke to the girl there, and she confirmed that they were doing the booster shot. She explained that it had to be done 182 days after the second Astra Zenica shot, and they were generally doing a walk in service on Mondays, Fridays, and a half day on Saturday. My 182 day are up on the 22nd of this month, which is a Friday, and so I shall present myself there early in the morning, and maybe get my booster shot 182 day to the minute after my spring vaccine.
  While walking through the park I noticed these fungi near to where an old tree had been cut down 5 or 6 years ago. Most of the remains of the tree have rotted away, but these shaggy ink cap fungi are feasting on the rotting remains. Apparently they are edible, and "very nice".  Yesterday they were probably at their best, and would have had to be consumed the same day. By today they may have turned into black goo. Apparently you can make a nice ink from them as they decompose. I'm too much of a coward to try eating wild fungus, but maybe I should be brave for examples like this because they are very distinctive, and can't be confused with anything else.

  After the hospital I went back through the park, which was not the shortest route, towards the pharmacy to pick up my latest repeat prescription. I had a bit of a wait there because although the prescription had been gathered together in a box by one of the minions, it still had to be checked by a pharmacist before I could take it home. I guess that took 10 minutes or so, but then I was on my way home again.

  I didn't walk very far, in the grand scheme of things, yesterday, but I felt happy to be home again, and able to relax. My legs were feeling very stiff when I started out, but that was mainly because I was standing still talking to my next door neighbour for as long as 20 minutes. That is what stiffened all the joints. Funnily enough were were comparing notes about out maladies, and it seems my neighbour is in a worse shape than me. He is on very strong painkillers for assorted aches and pains, although he tries not to use them too regularly. My aches and pains are still damped down enough by Paracetamol on bad days.

  I didn't feel inclined to do much during the afternoon, and I was looking forward to laying on my bed while the sun was still streaming through my bedroom windows, and reading, and probably snoozing. I was going to do that after consuming tow cans of hot soup. My extreme relaxation was interrupted by a text message from Michael. He had managed to get some petrol the night before, and was going to Tesco. "Did I want any bottles of Diet Coke ?". I said yes please, and then had to stay on alert for when Michael arrived with them.

  Apart from the soup I hadn't eaten anything else by dinnertime, and I was looking forward to a nice dinner. It turned out to be not as nice as hoped for, and to make matters worse it had a sting in it's tail. While I was in Aldi, on Monday morning, I picked up two packs of meat that were both marked 30% off because they were on their sell by date. One was a southern fried flavour pork schnitzels, and the other was Cajun flavoured schnitzels. They looked exotic and exciting, In reality they seemed to be made from poor quality cuts of meat, and the thick breadcrumb like covering, that covered the flavour, was to disguise the poor flavour of the meat. It was worth the experiment to try them, particularly at a discounted price, but I won't be buying them again.

  I had watched a bit of TV while eating, and continued after I had finished dinner, but when it came to watching QI at 8.20pm I realised I had seen that episode the day before. I could think of nothing better to do than going to bed to read for a while. As 9pm neared I thought that it would be a good time to go to sleep. I had had a some fresh air earlier in the day, and I hadn't had the snooze I was expecting to have in the afternoon. It seemed like I could probably fall fast asleep soon after I turned out the light.

  It turned out that I wasn't tired at all. It took several hours of thrashing around before I got to sleep. During that two hours (or whatever it really was) I had every annoyance in the book. It ranged from a single stray hair tickling my face as I tried to relax, to assorted aches and pains - not forgetting that old annoyance of it feeling too hot under the duvet, and too cold without it. I guess it was probably around 11pm that I turned the heater on to take the chill off the room. All of a sudden it was 2am, and I had just got three hours (maybe) of seemingly good sleep. I think I then got another 3 hours of decent sleep, but after that it was hard to stay asleep for much longer than 45 minutes. Fortunately it didn't need many 45 minute sleeps before it was 7am, and time to get up.

  This morning the truth about those schnitzels was revealed. I know that on one of the packs it said the, or I think it said that the sugar content was quite low. The catch was that would have been added sugar, and it was possibly for just 100gm of the product, and not the whole pack. Then there was the thick breadcrumb coating. It was almost like eating a sandwich made from thin bread. This morning my blood glucose, which was nice and low yesterday morning, had shot up to 9.6mmol/l this morning. It does seem odd that one meal could do that, but I can't think of any other explanation.

  There is one other possible explanation. It is that I have a cold. Any kind of infection can raise my blood glucose. When I saw Jodie on Sunday she was all snotty, and the next day she had come down with a full cold. Michael also said he had had a cold. I do feel a bit off colour this morning. My nose is not fully blocked, but it is feeling like it could become that way, and on top of that is my throat feeling a bit odd. Maybe the final nail in the coffin, if I want to submit to this hypothesis, is that my temperature is a tiny bit higher for this time of day. It is still very low by usual metrics, but 36.1° C seems a few tenths of a degree higher than usual....or it did until I checked last months reading, and that says it is actually very typical. OK, I haven't got a cold at all, and I can continue my day as usual.

  The problem now is trying to say what normal is. I won't be seeing Jodie today because she is going to a gig tonight if she is well enough. She suggest we have an afternoon drink tomorrow. I might see Michael for a few beers this afternoon if he is not rushing around trying to find one of the drugs he has been prescribed, and that seems to be in short supply. I doubt we will see him tomorrow because he has a dentist appointment. That still leaves the question of what I am going to do today. I may pop out to Tesco this morning, but I can't bring myself to go further under a grey and miserable sky. I expect I will be back to cataloguing my train pictures again.