There are many similarities to yesterday in the weather forecast, but there are two small differences. If the forecast is correct then it is the afternoon that will see the lighter coloured cloud cover instead of the morning, and today the temperature will be one degree cooler at just 6° C. Perhaps another, and rather important difference, is that the temperature will drop a fair bit tonight, and it could be just 3° C by the end of the day. Tomorrow morning may start at just 1° C, and there will probably be a thick frost. By 1pm the temperature may peak at 5° C. It should stay dry until as late as 10pm, and most of the day will see just white cloud covering the entire sky.

  I had some ideas of what I might do yesterday, but I don't think I did any of them. The most significant thing I did was to go shopping in Aldi in the morning, but I wrote about that yesterday. My blood glucose reading was low enough that I enjoyed a very late breakfast, probably it was brunch, of beer battered cod cooked in my mini oven. That was nice, but it was surprising what a beery smell it left in the kitchen. I guess that was nicer than a fishy smell.

  It was possibly gone midday when I forced myself to start setting up my old PC that can be booted into Windows XP, plus a VHS player to do some more VHS tape to digital video file conversions. In the end I didn't even get as far as starting that old PC. I somehow got distracted by the idea that it was time to decant all the photos, and things like screenshots, from my mobile phone to hard disk storage (plus back up disk).

  Transferring pictures from my phone is incredibly slow, and I am not sure why. It is as if the phone is buffering all the files in memory before sending them out via a very slow USB connection. I can't remember how many pictures I moved from the phone to hard disk, but I do know I could only transfer about 30 at a time. Any more than that, and it was like the phone and my PC had locked up. Nothing had actually locked up in any permanent sense, but it would partly seem like that for a few minutes or more. This made the process very slow.

  While I had the external back up hard disk attached to my PC I thought I might as well try and gather backups and stuff from old mobile phones in one place - a 500GB USB hard disk that was originally for backing up my photo collection from my PC before it was chock-a-block, and I moved on to a 1TB hard disk for those pictures. Transferring the pictures from older mobile phones was much faster, but the whole process took up much of the afternoon.

  I started cooking my dinner quite early to give it a chance to be well cooked before I wanted it. It was a very simple dinner of skinless/boneless chicken thighs and sprouts liberally sprinkled with dark soy sauce. The latter does have a fair bit of sugar in it, but most of that dissolves out into the juices from the chicken, and I threw it away. Both the chicken and the sprouts were roasted in my mini oven together.

  One sprout got close to having a burnt top, although it had merely turned brown and crispy, and not black and charred. What was interesting about that sprout, or maybe just the top surface, is that it really tasted like "fried seaweed" from a Chinese takeaway (which we know is not actually seaweed, but fried Chinese cabbage). The chicken was mostly nice and tasty, but I often wonder if it would be nicer with the skin and bones in place.

  I thought last night was going to be a bad night. It started with insomnia. I thrashed around in bed (well, sort of) until about midnight, and then suddenly I was fast asleep. Of course I only realised I had fallen asleep when I woke up for a pee, and noticed a couple of hours had passed by unnoticed. I didn't seem to have any trouble falling asleep again after that, and the next couple of time I woke up. I do remember dreaming, but no describable bits of dreams.

  I was very happy to see my blood glucose was just 7.7mmol/l. That is around the figure I would like to see most mornings. Once again it feels like I have battled and won against some unknown infection, and won without even realising I was doing it except for another run of high blood glucose readings that I couldn't really account for. If that was the case it seems I was over it a couple of days ago when my reading have slowly dropped to better figures.

  I can't say I felt good or bad this morning - I just felt neutral, although it did seem that time was passing far faster than I thought it was. So far this morning I have fed the birds (twice - the first time was just an old crust of bread), cooked breakfast, and had a shower. My breakfast was cheese on toasted stale bread, and it was rather nice. I used "East European" bread (I am not sure what nationality it claimed), and that bread is usually sugar free, and has a much more bubbly texture that makes it quite light - specially after being toasted.

  There are several things I will probably be doing today, although none of them will take up much time. One thing is to write Xmas cards from my neighbours next door (both sides). This morning I found a card from one neighbour, and it reminded me it was time to write the hand delivered cards - I did the posted ones a week or so ago. I want to go to the little supermarket on Catford Bridge for some more nice "Eastern European" recipe bread, and some other bits as take my fancy. I hope they sell cigarettes in there too because I need some for a Xmas present.

 Finally, with everything set up, and ready to be used, I ought to start copying/digitising some more VHS tapes. And finally, finally, because I've just remembered I have actually started it off, I have a builders bucket of clothes already soaking in detergent, that I need to finish and hang up on the clothes horse to dry.