The saddest thing about today is that the latest revision to the forecast has removed the sunny spells at 2 and 3pm with light cloud. However it is definitely sunny as I write this, and it should continue, albeit as sunny spells for the last couple of hours, until 11am. It is particularly cool this morning, and it will only rise to 12° C later in the afternoon - by which time it will be dull and overcast, and so it will still feel cold. Maybe tomorrow there is hope that the sun, or sunny spells, will continue into the afternoon. We need that to happen because the forecast predicts the afternoon temperature to rise to no more than 11° C.

  Yesterday was another day where the lack of sun made me feel mildly depressed. Not actually unhappy, but lacking in any enthusiasm to do anything except doing my shopping in Aldi. That was "exciting" (sort of), but soon after getting home again the reality of the day became apparent. I did end up doing three things, but none of them took up that much time, although the middle one could have.

  The first thing I did was to do some washing (by hand). There wasn't exactly a lot to do, but I do try not to let it build up. I guess on reflection I would describe it as a medium amount. Apart from leaving it to soak while I went shopping, and then had breakfast, and then let my breakfast settle down, I did it all in one go except for a small break when I went to put up the clothes horse, and turn the fan heater on low, while my laundry soaked in fabric conditioner.

  With the washing done I revert to lazy relaxation mode, and lay on my bed reading. With my high blood glucose reading in the morning I should have been trying to fast for much of the day, but I had already messed that one up by having some fish fingers for breakfast. By lunchtime my stomach seemed to be complaining that it was empty again. I didn't think some soup would hurt, and I had a can of lentil soup, and then a can of leek and potato soup. Neither had a very low sugar content, but both had a medium low sugar content.

  A little later I thought I really ought to get back to Jodie's mum's old Dell PC. The thing I wanted to try was to see if another power supply would get it working smoothly. It did seem to help a bit, but it still wasn't working right. I came to the conclusion that there was a problem with the motherboard. I had taken the hard drive out to replace it with one that I knew to be OK, and I had done the same with the CD drive, but it was still very edgy, and I never did get something simple like a disk partioner to even display it's control panel.

  I wondered what state the old hard disk was in, and so I connected it, via a USB interface to my working PC. It was so dead it couldn't even be seen. It was then that I decided to phone Jodie to ask if the PC stopped working after a thunderstorm. She said she didn't think so, but she did say that the house was once hit by lightning, and it had caused the electrics to trip in half the house.

  Maybe that only weakened the components on the motherboard, and they are subsequently failing, but I think I would be wasting my time in going any further on that PC. However I think I have a motherboard that would fit in the case nicely, and so I may investigate that, but that old motherboard is also an unknown quantity. I think I will try it out spread all over the table, and see if it appears to work before fitting it in the case. I don't know when I will do that. It could be today, it could be next week...

  The final thing I did yesterday was some cooking. One of the things I bought in Aldi, in the morning, was a bag of sprouts. I thought I would have a go at roast sprouts with bacon. I prepared the sprouts, poured on a bit of oil, added salt and pepper, and then after giving them a good stir around to try and get a film of oil on each sprout, I roasted them in my mini oven. When they were almost cooked I laid smoked bacon on top of them, and cooked that enough for it to get almost crispy.

  I have to admit I was rather disappointed with what I had made. It was not as nice as I hoped, and was half way to mildly unpleasant. With hindsight I wish I had precooked the bacon enough to drive off the worst of the water, and then put it over the sprouts when, in theory, only fat was coming off when cooked. Today I may well try a similar recipe, but use sausage meat instead of bacon.

  The original aim was that the bacon and sprouts would be enough for my dinner. I don't think that even if had been delicious it would have completely satisfy me. I ended up having 4 rice cakes with cheese and Marmite as a sort of dessert. They filled me up. The curious thing about those rice cakes is that the were salt and vinegar flavoured. I didn't check to see if that flavouring altered the nutritional value, and in particular, their sugar content. I've never been terribly confident that rice cakes don't increase my blood glucose despite the doctor who specialises in metabolic medicine saying they don't.

  Once again it seemed to take ages before I got to sleep. I think it was just gone 11pm when I finally fell asleep. Once asleep I seemed to sleep well, but unusually I seemed to be having long dreams in the first half of my dreams. I can remember very little of the actual action, but the essence of the dreams was that I had somehow acquired some old recordings. I seemed to be watching them on a PC, but I think they originated on 16mm film.

  They seemed to be lost recordings of Jimi Hendrix in a studio. There was one full song that had never been released. The other curiosity was that Paul McCartney was working in another studio in the building, and there was film/video of them doing some sort of duet. The curious thing is that I can't recall actually seeing that video, but I knew it was there. The other thing I had was an old cassette, that had been recorded on a Tascam 4 track cassette recorder, that had a load of rubbish on it, lots of dead air, but it did have at least one original song on it by a famous band who name I am not sure if I ever knew (in the dream).

  It was with some annoyance that I woke up at least an hour before I thought I should have done. I couldn't get back to sleep, and so I got up at about 6.30am. There was only hints of it starting to get light at that time (07:19 was the official time for sunrise this morning). As usual, the first thing I did after a wee, and washing my hands, was to check my blood glucose. I knew I hadn't been careful enough to get it back to a nicer low reading, but I didn't expect it to have gone up to 9.5mmol/l !

  I can't really explain the rise. I can't recall eating anything that bad. One possibility was that I was constipated yesterday, and I suppose that gave extra time for my digestive system to extract every last grain of sugar from what I had eaten yesterday, and the day before. I am happy to report I am not constipated this morning. I have been twice so far, and maybe once more will clear the backlog. I hope it will because I want to try and get out for a walk today. It seems I need some exercise, and it will do two things. It will burn off a little bit of glucose, and keep me away from the fridge for a few hours. With luck I can get walking before the sun goes in.