The weather today continues the trend started some days ago. It is going to be dull, and it is going to be mild with only a 10% chance of rain. There are two differences to yesterday. Today is predicted to be uniformly  very dull for the whole day, and the maximum temperature may only be 12° C instead of yesterday's 13° C. The trend will continue for several days, but each day will see the temperature drop a little. By next Tuesday, which might be the end of this trend, the daytime temperature may have dropped to just 4° C.

   I'm not sure if I was feeling quite as good yesterday as I was the day before, but there was probably little in it. Of course my mood was buoyed by the hope that I would be seeing Angela for a drink at lunchtime. In preparation for that I had a shave and washed my hair. That provides a lift at any time.

  I had a plan that I would leave early enough to walk in the wrong direction so I could pick up a copy of The Metro newspaper at Catford Bridge station on my way. I then intended to wall the entire length of Ladywell Fields, and feed some squirrels on the way.

  It didn't quite happen like that because although I had left early, I had not left early enough to accomplish all that. I made matters worse by waiting on Catford Bridge station to take a snap of the next train. It was only a few minutes wait, but every minute counted !

  It was when taking that picture that I realised I had made a sort of mistake. One of the cameras in my collection is a Nikon Coolpix L29 - a small, pocket sized camera. If I recall correctly I saw it in a second hand shop for a very low price. It could have even been just £10, but I had to buy a memory card for it.

  One thing I didn't have to do was to buy new batteries, or at least not in the sense that I might have done for other cameras. The L29 uses a pair of ordinary AA cells, and so could be handy if I was using it away from any charging facilities for rechargeable batteries. As far as I can tell it is quite frugal with it's power needs, and a pair of AA cells lasts a long time.
  It was when I took this picture that I realised two things. The first was that it was very dull out, and the second is that as good as that Nikon L29 was in many ways, low light performance was not one of them. I think the shutter speed for this photo was just 1/20th second, and a picture taken a second or two earlier, before the train had stopped, was really motion blurred. This picture is teetering on the edge between blur and sharp, and it still needed a bit of brightening up.
  Things were a bit sharper with a stationery object, and with the (invisible) sun over my shoulder, the picture is a bit brighter. The subject of the picture is the push bike, or what's left of it. It must have really pissed off the owner to come back and find just a frame. I guess it could be rebuilt, but it was probably easier to steal or buy another bike.
  To take this picture of a squirrel under the shade of a tree meant using flash, but it was a little outside the range of the little flash built into the camera.
  Ladywell Fields is a multi eco park. What that means is that there are lots of different areas that represent different types of habitat. One such habitat is supposed to represent a dry river bed. In summer that is sort of what it might look like, but yesterday it was more like a lake !
  Once upon a time I just took pictures of ducks because they were easy to take pictures of. Now I seem to take pictures of squirrels. They are fattening themselves up for winter, and so are quite keen to pose if you throw them some almonds (which seems to be their favourite nut). I took this picture using flash, and that gave the squirrel red eye. My red eye filter didn't seem to work on squirrels eyes, and I ended up just trying to darken the eye. It got rid of the red glow, but looks very unnatural.
  This almost a dove like pigeon was also interested in my almonds, and was almost standing at my feet. I find it sort of odd that pigeons in the park, or on the road, allow you to pass right next to them, but when they are on my bird table they instantly fly off out of sight if I go out to top up the feed on the bird table.

  It was very nice to see Angela in the pub, very nice, but maybe there wasn't quite the warmth that there sometimes is. We had our usual two drinks, and talked about this and that. To my mind the session was spoiled a bit by two primary school teachers who had come in from the school across the road. They were all dressed up in Xmas stuff, and were putting Xmas songs on the juke box. It was all a bit vomit inducing.

  I did get a tiny bit of light revenge when I had them looking for AC/DC's Xmas song - as far as I am aware AC/DC never did a heavy metal Xmas song - which is probably just as well ! After the hour was up I walked Angela back to work. There was no hug this time, but she did blow me a kiss. I still felt happy enough to walk back through the park to feed a few more squirrels. The last couple of pictures above were taken on my way home.


   When I got home I didn't want to do my usual thing of having some lunch. I was doing my best to eat as little as possible because of my high blood glucose reading. I think it was a couple of hours later that I partly gave in and had a handful of peanuts. That seemed to be enough to reduce my hunger to more manageable levels, but I still ended up having my dinner a little earlier than usual. Maybe I was sustained by Angela sending me another picture - as she often does on Wednesdays.

I stuck to my plan of just having soup for dinner - without anything with it like bread. I started with a tin of Tesco lentil and bacon soup. That had quite a low sugar content. I then had a can of Tesco cream of chicken soup. That has a very low sugar content. Finally I had a can of Aldi own brand, Bramwells, chunky beef and vegetable soup. That has a little more sugar in it, but is still quite low considering all the stuff in it.

  Ideally that soup should have been quite sufficient for the day, but I was finding that TV was not providing a strong distraction from the real world, and during a ad break I prepared cheese on three waterbread crackers. The packet said that each cracker had just 0.2gm of sugar - which is pretty low if you only eat three of them.

  As is usual, I read in bed for an hour or two before trying for sleep. I decided not to take any painkillers for a few aches I had, and those aches did slow me down a bit, but it wasn't long before I was sound asleep. Once again I seemed to sleep well, but only as far as about 5am. From then on my sleep was a lot lighter. I think it was probably then that I had a long rambling, and mostly nonsensical dream inspired by today's upcoming ordeal.

  My blood glucose had dropped to 9.2mmol/l this morning, but after being careful with what I ate, I had hoped it would be a bit lower than that. It is a barely acceptable reading, and doesn't bode well for the future. On the other hand it is possible that the level will drop back to my earlier lower readings for no obvious reason. I won't be eating that much until dinner time today because I have things to do.

  Today's "great ordeal" is more than likely going to be another farce. I have been summoned for another try at an ultrasound scan of my aortic artery. Apparently that artery can explode with fatal results, and so all old bastards like me are being screened for it. I first attended a screening in Beckenham about 18 months ago. That didn't work because the portable ultrasound scanner wasn't powerful enough to see through my belly fat.

  Today's attempted scan is taking place in Bellingham Green, and although it is getting on for 2 miles away, I can, and will walk there. The chances are that I will be wasting my time, and they will be wasting theirs too. The walk is similar in length to my walks through the Linear Park to the bow string bridge and back. That walk usually takes 90 minutes, and that is with occasional stops for photography. I reckon I can walk to Bellingham Green in 45 minutes, but I think I had better allow another 5 or 10 minutes to be on the safe side.

  One problem with this appointment could be if they are running late. I need to be home again ideally before 3pm, or at least not too long after 3pm for another Thursday afternoon beer drinking session with Jodie and Michael. I doubt I will be home in time for Michael to drop off the bottles of coke he will (hopefully) be buying for me when he does his shopping in Tesco. I'll have to arrange to get them from him, at his home, some time later.