Yesterday the prediction was this morning would be sunny, and it is, the this morning's version of the forecast didn't predict it. The forecast has been revised now, and it shows sunny spells for 10 and 11am. The rest of the day will be cloudy, but maybe mostly thin cloud. There is a 10% chance of rain up to 3pm, but it will probably be dry all day. The afternoon temperature should be 16° C. Tomorrow should be dry, and could feature a few sunny spells in the afternoon. The temperature could be a degree higher than today.
 
   Yesterday, and particularly before 1pm, was really rather busy. It all started with my delivery from Star Bargains. I had to put all the stuff away, and then cut up the cardboard boxes to go in the recycling bin. That left flecks of cardboard on the dining room carpet. One of the things about yesterday was that I thought that maybe Jodie was coming over for some beer drinking. I was wrong, but it spurred me on to do some housework.

  One of the first things I did was to finish washing the medium sized bath towel that I had left soaking after I had had a shower. I washed that towel in two stages because it seemed to take ages to wash all the soap out. For most clothes I do three rinses. The bath towel needed 5 rinses - so a 7 stage process starting with the wash in detergent, and finally the fabric conditioner. It seemed like it would be OK to hang it on the washing line, provided I kept an eye out for rain. I did the former, but not the latter !

  While I was in the garden earlier in the morning, feeding the birds, I noticed some leakage, or what I thought was leakage from where the waste pipe from my bath joins the main soil stack. When I went out to hang the towel on the line I expected big puddles after having a shower, and then pouring 7 buckets of laundry water (for want of a better description) down the bath plughole. To my surprise there was none at all.

  I think that what I took to be leakage may have just been some rain earlier in the morning. Even if there is no leak I still need to make a better job of the temporary support for the middle of the pipe. To that end I moved the garden waste bin away from the back of the house to a yard and a half onto what may one day be lawn. I then did some weeding. Nearly all the weeds were nettles, big bastard nettles and some thin bits of bramble. I used some leather(ette) handling gloves. The protected my hand from those nettles, but I still managed to sting my arms !

  I didn't do anything to the plumbing, but I have cleared the path at the back of the house now to make it easier/possible in the future. Next on the agenda was clearing Jodies's mum's oldest PC off the dining room tables. It was spread all over the table in many parts. I didn't bother with any screws, I just put them in a plastic bag, but I roughly put the PC back together enough to dump it in the corner of the front room for now.

  The dining room table, and "easy to clean" PVC table cloth needed a good wipe down. I used some surface cleaner to give it a good clean. With that done I got the hoover out and hoovered the room to pick up the flecks of cardboard, general dust and fluff, and quite a few crumbs from where Jodie usually has a nibble while drinking beer.  With all that done I could relax until Jodie arrived - except she didn't. I was probably drunk at the time, but it seems we had agreed that the next drink would be Thursday, and not Wednesday. It has now actually been brought forward to Tomorrow, Wednesday for logistical reasons.

  While waiting for Jodie, and then after we had spoken and confirmed that she would be coming over tomorrow, I got back to me cataloguing, on a spreadsheet, all my diesel and electric train pictures. That job, or at least phase one of it, is starting to get near to completion now. I am up to the year 2015, and I don't think I did that much train photography in recent years....but you never know. Phase 2, if I ever do it, is to copy all the photos catalogued into maybe one folder on the PC, and then link to each photo on the spreadsheet.

  I have to confess that during the day I ate a lot of snacks - and nothing else. I tried several flavours of crisps of various kinds. When it came to dinner I thought I had better play it safe, and try and stick to known low sugar soups. I started with a Tesco cream of chicken soup. That has the lowest sugar content of any soup I have found so far. Then I got daring. I had bought for pots of Fray Bentos BBQ sausage and black bean stew from Star Bargains without realising that they seemed to be quite high in sugar.

  On reflection I don't think it is as bad as I thought fr the simple reason that they are remarkably small - perhaps half the size of a can of soup. I had one, and it was OK, and I'll happily eat the other three pots at an appropriate time, but it was far from wonderful. I followed that with a can of Aldi's pea and ham soup. Now that is delicious - it is all thick and creamy, and with the aid of a good splash of hot chilli sauce it is wonderful (and has a low sugar content).

  I watched a fair bit of TV last night, some Star Trek and two episodes of QI before I felt ready for bed. I read for a while, and probably fell asleep near 10pm. I slept pretty well, but had some mildly unpleasant dreams. The worst was about working in a telephone exchange. In real life that was enjoyable, but in the dream the planners had crammed in far too much equipment in the building. For some reason I had a rucksack on, and that just made it impossible to squeeze through all the small gaps that were left. To add to the nighmareish quality of the dream there were occasions when I could get to somewhere by one route through all the equipment, but couldn't seem to get back the same way.

  Maybe the worst thing about my sleep is that I didn't, or couldn't seem to sleep late enough. Evidently some bit of me had decided I had had sufficient sleep by 6am, but I didn't want to get up before it was starting to get light, and I thrashed around getting a few minute sleep here or there until it was just about 7am. Of course with sunrise at 7.44am this morning there were only hints of it starting to get light at 7am, but I slowly got up anyway.

  As usual, after eating inappropriate food (or what I assumed to be inappropriate) I felt very guilty when checking my blood glucose level this morning. Surely all those crisps and stuff would play havoc with it, but to my astonishment I was spot on target. It was 7.5mmol/l again, and my running average for this month had dropped to 8.46mmol/l, and that is 0.05 above my lowest monthly reading this year. If it hadn't been for some of the very high reading I had near the beginning of this month my average could have been down as low as my readings for the end of 2019 - which were deemed to be very good by the hospitals diabetic nurse.

  My blood glucose may be nice and low, but I can't say I feel that good for it. Maybe I was sleeping awkwardly, but I had some assorted back aches, and a few other aches when I got up. They do seem to be fading away now, but maybe only as a result of taking some Ibuprofen. I suspect I need to stretch my legs, and I am going to try and do that today. My plan is to grab a camera and go for a ride on a train or two. I don't fancy any distant exploration, but a few hours rding trains locally may suffice.