I find I don't have much faith in today's weather forecast. Last night mist and fog was predicted for most of the morning. The early forecast this morning, as shown above, only suggests mist at 11am. A later revision added mist for much of the morning. The very latest revision doesn't show any mist at all, but right now there should be fog. Maybe all these things are happening somewhere in London, but here in Catford the air is as clear as a bell ! However the temperature forecast was spot on. It was bloody cold, around 2° C, early this morning, but the temperature is slowly rising, and maybe it will make the predicted 8° C by 3pm. The latest revision of the forecast still shows 1pm onwards as featuring dark and heavy clouds with a 10% chance of rain. There could be some rain in the early hours of tomorrow morning, but most of the day is currently predicted to be sunny with the unusual curiosity with the temperature starting at around 7° C in the morning, and it falling to just 5° C in the middle of the afternoon and sunshine !

  My constipation ended at about the same time I finished writing yesterday. It was a relief to get that over in more ways than one. It meant I could go for a little walk. It was just a shopping trip though, and not proper exercise. I started by going to the cash machine outside the Tesco Express on the high street. With my wallet topped up I wandered down to Poundland where I bought a selection of bird feed. I think their bird seed is very poor quality, but the birds find it quite acceptable on cold frost mornings like today.

  After finishing in Poundland I crossed the main road to go into the Polish Shop - actually called Korona according to the big sign at the top.  I was particularly looking for some Barszcz - as recommended by Marta (Polish singer who sings for Dik and his band Entourage). She also recommended that the nice ladies in the shop would help if I couldn't find it.

  I did find a small pot of Barszcz soup powder, but I needed the assistance of one of the nice ladies in there to find the packet of the ready made, heat to eat, soup in the packet pictured on the left. Apparently it is exactly what Marta was recommending.

  I've never been in that shop before, although it has intrigued me for quite some time now. Upon exploring it I found they do a fair selection of beers, and many of them I didn't recognise. I am hoping Jodie won't recognise them either. I only wanted to carry four bottles, and that was all I bought, but there are others to go back for sometime.

  One thing I was hoping for was some nice bread, and I found a large sliced loaf. It was a round loaf, and hadn't been baked in a tin. That meant that the middle slices were very big compared to crappy old Sunblest. It was made from wholemeal bread, and I got the feeling that while most English bread is made from wholemeal flour it also has all the bran left over from making white flour added to it. The bread I bought yesterday just had enough flecks of bran to give the bread a very light brown colour. It was rather nice - particularly with some freshly sliced (in front of me) smoked ham. I also bought, and tried a couple of nice  pots of mustard. One was a bit like German mustard, and the other had Jalapeños in it.

  I was a bit worried about all the bread I was eating yesterday. I had also eaten the last of the easy peeler oranges. I had visions of my blood glucose really going through the roof. At least I know I had a very safe dinner (except for the sandwich after it !).  It was essentially home made chicken shish kebab. I don't have a charcoal grill, and so I cooked the chicken thighs in the oven with some olive oil, and a lot of seasonings. I ate it with an approximation to the salad that typically comes with many kebabs - thinly sliced white cabbage and red onion. I have to say it was very enjoyable.

  Going back to the afternoon and I seemed to amuse myself playing with computers, and in particular testing out an old (but not ancient) motherboard with an AMD Athlon processor in it. Ultimately, if I get everything else in it running OK, I have an Athlon XP 2.4Ghz processor that will, or should, make it it quite a nippy machine for simple stuff like web browsing and word processing.

  I had made a start on it the previous day, with no success, but my first success yesterday was to get the memory (RAM) up to the maximum the motherboard can take, 1GB. That is a bit low by modern standards, but with a big swap partition, Linix should be mostly happy with it. I seem to have a lot of memory sticks that must have the wrong spec, but otherwise seem identical to the (matched) pair of 512MB ram sticks I eventually used. It is possible they are faulty, but the wrong spec seems more likely.

  By mid afternoon, or maybe a bit later I was ready for the big test - installing Linux Mint 17.2. As a live CD it booted and ran perfectly OK. When I came to try and install it I found it failed. I was too busy preparing my dinner to watch it closely to see the point that it failed, but I guessed it may have been when it was trying to install the boot loader. I tried two different hard disk, in case one was faulty, and I tried two different DVDs of the Linux Mint installer (one of them being 17.0 and the other 17.2), and they all failed. That was almost 6pm and I gave up to have my dinner.
  It was later on, just as I was going to go to bed, I suddenly had an idea. That motherboard was made in an era when boot sector viruses were popular. Unlike modern day viruses, the boot sector variety was often just a annoyance, but it was fairly easy to protect against, and this motherboard has it built in. I suspect the Linux installer was trying to write the boot sector of the hard disk, and it just wasn't allowed. Later today I will turn the protection off, if it was on, and see if it installs correctly.

  Last night was another night when I didn't seem to feel very tired until I started reading in bed, and then I found I couldn't stop yawning. The only problem is that I had to force my eyes open to read the last two pages of the book. After that I think I fell asleep very quickly. My sleep was probably very similar to the sleep I got the previous night - mostly quite good. I woke up several times, maybe 5 in all, and each time I woke I checked my thermometers to see the temperature slowly falling towards a frost this morning.  As seems normal now, I partly got up and hour early to turn my heater on full before getting back under the duvet and sleeping a bit more.

  It still seemed quite chilly when I really got up, and it was for this reason that I didn't have a shower. I did do face, armpits and "nether regions" with a soapy flannel though. When I was halfway through I wondered why I was doing it because standing under stream of hot water water would have been more comfortable than standing butt naked in a freezing bathroom with only a flannel for company.

  I was expecting the worst when I checked my blood glucose level. All that bread, and the fruit I had couldn't have been good, but actually it seems it was. This morning my blood glucose was down to 8.1mmol/l. If I could hold there for the last 7 days of the month there is still a good chance it could be a record low month. The trouble is that I don't really understand what is going on.

  Today, being a Wednesday, I would be looking forward to a lunchtime drink with Angela, but unless I get a last minute message from her, I won't be meeting her today. She has been on a short holiday at Seaford on the Sussex coast. I think she said she would be back by now, but would have too much work to catch up on to drink at lunchtime. Of course sods law says that on a day when I haven't had a proper shower, and my hair is not at it's best, today would be the exact day when I am given 30 minutes notice to meet at the pub.

  Assuming I don't go to the pub, and in reality it is highly unlikely that I will, I will while away the afternoon playing with that computer spread out all over the dining room table. If I can get over that install hurdle I will be able to swap the motherboard over with the blown up one in the Dell case, that used to belong to Jodie's mum, and end up with a working, usable, but probably unused spare computer.