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October 2021 November 2021

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Monday 15th November 2021
10:01 GMT

  Yesterday was relentlessly dull - just like the day before ! Oddly enough it was also dry. That is sort of odd, although maybe not surprising when the only reason it is odd is that various revisions of the weather forecast were insistent that there would be some showers from mid afternoon. I was not aware of it being anything but dry. The temperature maged to rise to 13° C for most of the afternoon.
as dull
                                as yesterday, but a degree cooler
  The forecast for today predicted an even duller day than yesterday. Sometimes it won't be quite as dull, but it will always be dull. It will probably be dry, although there is a 10% chance of rain at any time. It will be another degree cooler than yesterday at just 12° C. Tomorrow may see some sunny spells in the morning, but mostly it will be a slightly less dull day than today, and it will be cooler still. The temperature may briefly touch 12° C, but most of the time it will be just 11° C.

   Yesterday was yet another day when I was not terribly productive. In fact you could say I wasn't productive at all. I blame it on the dreary day. I just get anti-enthused when the sky is grey. My most productive thing, although the actual product was close to zero, was to finally get Jodie's mum's other, and younger, old computer on the table, and to start investigating it.

  As I may have mentioned yesterday, or the day before, it is a Dell PC, and in my terms it is close to modern. It has a 2.5GHz Pentium IV processor in it. Being a single core processor it won't cope with multiple tasks, but it should be OK for single tasks. There is only 768MB of memory in it. That should be enough to get started for most experiments, but should I actually get it going properly I would hope I can increase that to maybe 2GB.

  All my experiments have ended in failure. The failures seem almost random, and that suggests a power supply problem. Fortunately the power supply looks to be a standard ATX + P4 unit, and I will try replacing it to see what happens. Initially I will just dangle the new power supply outside the case. One thing that does run OK, because it demands very little power from the processor, and with the hard disks and CD drive not being used, there is little drain on the power supply, is a memory test program.

  After trying assorted things to try and get a desktop up, I resorted to using Memtest 86 - a memory test program. It confirmed it could see the 768MB of RAM, and it started to test it. That was just before dinner time, and I left it running over night. The test program has done 28 full test cycles, and found no memory errors when I checked this morning. That eliminates one source of possible problems.

  I had fish fingers for breakfast. They are usually safe, or so I seem to think. My lunch was a couple of bowls of instant noodles. They were slightly special in as much as they were Polish noodles with Polish flavours. The actual noodles may have been made in Poland, or anywhere else in the world, and I doubt that they were any different to any other noodles. The flavourings were definitely different though.
Borscht
                                    flavour noodles
  The first flavour I had was one I had previously tried, and found it to be good, but nothing to get very excited about. It was the second flavour that was unusual. It was Borscht flavour, and I had never tried it before. It is based on beetroot (and the picture of it about should look more purple than red). I was wary of beetroot in any cooking. I thought it would taste far too earthy, but maybe I was wrong. Of course no instant noodle ever tastes anything like what it says on the packet, or even like anything on the good green Earth, but these noodles did have a rather nice taste that I can only describe as slightly tangy. I almost wonder what they would have been like without the Caribbean hot chilli sauce I added !

dark
                                    clouds
more dark
                                    clouds

  I hope these two pictures, taken 2:40pm, show a good reason why I didn't want to go out yesterday. If it had been 2° C instead of 12° C, I could easily have believed it was about to snow. I found it very depressing, and it probably affected my choice and quantity of dinner later on. I was briefly cheered by my Amazon delivery arriving surprisingly early at 3pm. I was gloomily thinking it might be nearer "before 9pm", as is usually quoted at first. By 2am they had refined the delivery time to between 2 and 4pm, and 3pm is exactly between those two times.

  The delivery was of two more whiskies. One was a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label whisky. In fact what arrived was double black. Maybe that is "Black Label", or maybe I got a better (or just different) version instead, but I sort of doubt it. It is matured in freshly charred oak barrels, and definitely has a charred sort of taste. It is not quite to my liking, but is OK, and infinitely better than a burnt peat flavour. That could be a mix of burnt tyres and cow dung as far as I am concerned. The other bottle was an Irish whiskey. Hinch, and a little sip tasted very nice and smooth, as many Irish whiskies tend to be.

  My dinner was a chicken stew with potatoes and peas in it. It was rather nice. In fact maybe it was too nice because I ate more than intended. If I had had some sort of dessert after it I could have had half yesterday, and half yesterday. Instead I ate the whole lot ! That might not have been a good idea, although at the time, or at least as I started it, I thought what harm can it do. I would find out this morning.

  Before that I had to get some sleep, and it didn't come easy. I thought I was ready for bed as early as 8pm. I didn't actually go to bed then, but I think I did very soon after 9pm. I read for a while, and I think I put the book down before 10pm. I expected to fall asleep fairly quickly, but it seems I just wasn't tired enough. I finally fell asleep around midnight. From then on I slept fairly well, but there were a few times in the night when I couldn't seem to get the temperature right.

  At 5am the heater had been on low for half the night, but I couldn't seem to get warm enough under the duvet....or maybe that was warm and comfortable enough. That seemed to be my cue to turn the heater up full. I seemed to sleep very well after that, and I woke up just after 7am with most of the duvet kicked aside. I didn't feel all that good when I got up, but now it is hard to say why. Maybe I just felt a but excessively stiff and creaky.

  This morning my blood glucose had shot up to 9.0mmol/l. I think I have to blame the excess chicken stew for that. It is not a completely awful reading, but it does mean that like the day before yesterday, I have to spend the day being careful with what I eat in the hope that tomorrow it will be, ideally, under 8.0mmol/l. The difficulty is that today is not an ideal day for doing that because today is shopping day.

  I got myself showered and dressed, ready to go to Aldi soon after 9am. It was actually a nice walk to Aldi. If I had been complaining on stiffness earlier, it seemed to have gone by the time I walked to Aldi. It was made a nice walk by braving the cool weather by not wearing a coat. There seemed to be very little wind this morning, and that made 12° C passable with bare arms.

  I could have gone to Tesco instead of Aldi, but there was one thing (maybe two things) I particularly wanted to look out for in Aldi. One was a reasonable priced (£24) Japanese whisky, and the other may have been an aged bourbon that tastes suspiciously like Jack Daniels, but is several pound cheaper. Actually, the little sip I had when I got it home may have tasted better than Jack Daniels. The Japanese whisky was rather pleasant too.

  When it came to food I did try and be selective about what I bought, and generally most of what I bought could be classified as safe if eaten in less than over generous quantities. I don't think that includes something I saw in the frreezers, and which I bought two bags of. They were bags of sprouts with pine nuts in a balsamic glaze. It wasn't until I got home that I checked to find they have a rather high sugar content. Oh well, I'll try and enjoy them at an appropriate time.

  I bought rather a lot in Aldi if measured by weight. The walk home was not quite as enjoyable as the walk there, but it wasn't as bad as I had imagined when I first felt the weight of the bags I was carrying. I also had 6 litres of Diet Coke, and the two bottles of spirits in my rucksack weighing me down. Despite my high blood glucose I cooked myself some bacon when I got home.

  It is too grim to consider going out to enjoy myself, and I don't think I need to go out again for any shopping. It looks like I will have to amuse myself at home today. The only possibility of something better than playing with old PCs is if Jodie wants to come over for some beers today. She should have been over yesterday, but she had an afternoon appointment with the vicar concerning her dad's funeral. As far as she is concerned he could be just tipped into the Thames, but a forgotten aunt has popped up, and apparently without offering to help pay for it all, has demanded a proper funeral. Jodie is rather peeved about this because she has to arrange and pay for it.
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