Even the latest revision of the forecast still says that today will be grey from start to finish. It is the sort of greyness that mandates having the lights on indoors. The start of the afternoon may be 12° C, but nearly all of the rest of the day will be 11° C. There is a 10% chance of rain at any time today. That probably means it will stay dry, but gives the forecasters enough wriggle room if there is an occasional shower. Tomorrow may start with a few hours of sunshine. In the mid to late afternoon light rain can be expected. It will be rather chilly. The best we can hope for tomorrow is just 8° C !

  Yesterday was dull by weather, and dull by activities ! I think I really only did two things that were sort of productive, and one of them stopped other potential activity. The most productive was to wash a few clothes. It included my home "drinking trousers" - a pair of slip on trousers that don't looks so slouchy as the usual "lounge pants" I tend to wear around the house when on my own. There was nothing particularly heavy in that wash, although wringing out those trousers took some effort.

  The other bit of productivity, if you can call it that, was copying over all the files from a bursting at the seams One terabyte external hard drive to a roomier two terabyte external hard drive. At the moment it is almost the only copy of the complete set of files, although I still have the hard disk they were copied from. I have ordered another 2 terabyte USB hard drive so I can have a complete backup of the master drive. The problem of copying close to 1 terabyte of data is that it takes up an awful lot of time, and although I can, and did use my PC while the copying is taking place, it never feels like a good idea to do so.

  There was one other thing I did that was productive when viewed with the benefit of hind sight. It was to be quite careful about what I ate, although in reality I did eat a few things that were a bit rash. I think I had a cheese sandwich for breakfast. I am never quite sure if that is safe with regard to my blood glucose. I know it definitely make me feel very sluggish, and is to be avoided if I do anything that needs a bit of effort - such as walking, and even housework !

  For lunch I had two cans of soup, and I know they are usually very safe. What I can't remember is what between meals snacks I might have eaten. I know I had a handful of peanuts, and maybe I had two, or maybe I ate something else. I know I very rashly ate some Turkish delight. It would seem to contain a lot of sugar, but is mostly just flavoured gelatin. Most types are sprinkled with icing sugar, and I washed that off before eating it. I ate quite a few squares of mint flavour Turkish delight trying to find the mint flavour. It seemed to have none, and the flavour it did have was rather unpleasant.

  When it came to dinner time I chose a known very safe, but expensive option - takeaway shish kebabs. I ordered a large chicken, and large lamb kebab. They are about double the size of the small/regular size, but cost a fair bit less than double. As usual I ate the meat and salad, and discarded the pitta bread. I never have worked out if not eating the bread makes any difference on not, but I do know that without it is very benign to my blood glucose.

  I even dared to have a dessert, and it seemed like a stupid choice, but I just fancied something that I hoped would be very nice. It was more Turkish delight, but this was from a fancy collection with all sorts of weird and wonderful flavours. Some of the cubes were very sticky with sugar. It seemed madness to eat it, but I still enjoyed most of the cubes. One of them had some flavour that I didn't care for.

  I was dubious about running the TV application on my computer while it was copy date from hard disk to hard disk, but it seemed to work with no problems. It feels like the TV application should use a lot of resources, but it seems to be a very light user. I ended up watching TV until just gone 9pm. The last things I watched were a couple of short(ish) documentaries about Roy Orbison. He is one of those singers who is technically very good, but I've never really warmed to him. However all the praise he was getting from other famous musicians was quite infectious.

  After I turned off the TV I read for a while, but started feeling very sleepy quite quickly. I wasn't really clock watching, but I think it was around 10pm when I fell asleep. The dreams I had at what seemed like the beginning of the night were sort of interesting. There were two that were very different, but featured the same symbolism. In the first there was a bit of unknown machinery that was belt driven, and the belt had broken. It was a long belt, maybe 30ft long, and it was strangely all crinkly. It looked like crepe paper, but I think it was inspired by the look of a cassette tape after the tape had broken, and wrapped itself around the capstan in the player.

  The break in the belt was not obvious until I had gone up some escalators, carrying a dog for some unexplained reason (carrying a dog on escalators is very recommended, but where  the dog appeared from is a mystery). From higher up the break in the belt was obvious, and I think I was planning to fix it, but then my dream wander off to another location - a bar. That too had some sort of conveyor on the bar, and it too was broken. It was little more than twisted loops of wire, and I was definitely going to fix it.

  The dream faded at that point, and I might have even woken up for a wee than. It did leave me wondering on the significance of the symbolism in those dreams. Was the moving belt/chain supposed to symbolise "what goes around, comes around" ? I can think, or maybe hope for a positive outcome from that idea, but there is the alternative idea that the break in the belt/chain symbolises that no matter how much you give there will never be any return. That viewpoint is rather depressing.

  A seemingly long dream shortly before waking up featured a runaway train because the line was flooded (the opposite of what normally happens - the train comes to a long halt).  The train ran non stop towards Charing Cross, but instead of crashing it ran out of rails, and went through one of the big exits to the station, and came to a halt neatly parked at the side of the road. That was all rather inventive, but not as inventive as the journey home again. By now the track was flooded so deep that the water was higher than the edge of the tracks, and yet none  of the water seemed to flow away over the side. The train itself was still a train, and still seemed to run straight, as if on rails, by when through the water like a boat. It was all one of those dreams where little actually happened, but the scenery was magnificent !

  I guess I got a decent amount of sleep, but the grey light coming through the windows does not enthuse me, and I sort of wish I was still asleep. Anyway, the good news is that despite taking some stupid chances on stuff like the Turkish Delight, my blood glucose is back down to a very nice 8.2mmol/l, and if it can stay that way it could give me another excellent running average for the month. At the moment to running average for the month is 8.5mmol/l, and that is very, err, average !

  Prior to the reality of today I did have at least one stupid idea that I might go to Lidl to see what they have these days. The reality is that the grey light repulses me from going out, and saps any enthusiasm to do anything. I think I will force myself to do a very limited amount of housework. I might do a bit of light dusting in the front room. I might run the hoover over the front room and dining room. I will definitely do some stuff in the kitchen - clear a days backlog of washing up, and wipe down the counter tops. Finally I will probably do some more laundry. I know I have a hand towel, and t-shirt, and a pair of pants or two. There might be another t-shirt as well.

  Other than that there is one thing I might possibly do. It is to take some test shots using my Nikon D80 camera. As I have mentioned every time I have used it, it always seems to take under exposed pictures. I want to take a series of pictures of the same thing, and gradually increase the expose from what the camera thinks is correct to well over exposed to see just how underexposed the pictures are. It will mean always using manual exposure, which is OK, but not always convenient, and then opening up the iris by however many f stops are needed to get a good exposure. I might also check to see how it is when using flash.....or I might just read a book all day.