This run of cold but sunny days continues today. There is still a thick frost outside, and while the forecast says 2° C, my garden thermometer says it is just ½° C right now. The latest revision predicts the temperature should rise to  6° C by 3pm. Soon after that it will start to fall, and tomorrow may start with a frost again, and possibly freezing fog in the early hours of the morning too ! Any fog or mist will probably have gone by sunrise, and then the day will be just cold, and mostly dull, although there could be a couple of sunny spells in the late morning.

   Apart from doing a bit of tidying up, not much happened yesterday until Michael, and then Jodie turned up for our beer drinking session. I worked out a new scheme for these sessions. Michael is really a lager drinker, and doesn't care for some of the exotic beers Jodie likes, and so I now offer him some basic lager, and he just has a small splash of the exotic beers so he can say he has tasted them. The flaw, or not flaw in this plan, is that Jodie has developed a pretty odd taste in beers.

  She has grown to like, or maybe convinced herself she must like some pretty unpleasant beers because they come from hipster breweries, sometime in "Nordic" countries, and often have bold and colourful labels or cans. Yesterday the cracks in her taste preferences started to emerge. There were two beer we tried, and both of them were very sour, and as cloudy as pea soup. I was not keen on them, but they were drinkable after a fashion. To my surprise, Jodie remarked that they were not very nice.

  Maybe in the future we can get back to decent German and Belgium beers. They were what Jodie always tried to source from small specialist beer shops 20 years ago, and on the whole they were very nice. Some of the Abbey beers from Belgium (and sometimes France) did have a very strong taste that needed a bit of getting used to, but unlike some of the sour and cloudy beers that have become popular with hipsters with Amish style beards, they were not basically nasty.

  As far as I can remember, I had some breakfast (fish fingers) quite early yesterday, but a lot of hours passed without eating any more before we started drinking. The result of that was that I was feeling quite tipsy after Michael and Jodie had gone home. I was also feeling hungry, but I didn't allow that to inspire me to eat any more than I had originally intended for dinner.

  My dinner was, as planned, very unhealthy. The first course was a pair of "chip shop curry" filled chicken kievs, or a better description might be kiev-like, but nothing like a real kiev with all it's butter, garlic and herbs. The "chip shop curry" was just a tasteless brown goo. I am glad I had already started cooking the second course before I had even eaten one of those "Kievs". The second course was "Souther fried flavoured" chicken steaks. They were the Aldi version with the better meat, and far less sugar than the Tesco offering.

  I watched a bit of TV (Star Trek: Voyager), then read a bit in bed before falling into a deep sleep. I think that sleep started at about 9pm, but it might have been later. I woke up again after 11pm, maybe even 11:30pm, and I felt dreadful. Some of it was hangover that it would have been better to sleep through, but a lot of it was a vaguely placed stomach pain. It was like trapped wind, but not exactly like it, and to make life more complex I didn't know what end the wind was trapped if indeed it was trapped.

  I was certainly belching a lot, and I did wonder if I was going to throw up. I also thought that I might have some heartburn, and so I took a couple of antacid tablets. It was just past midnight when I started to pass wind. I thought "good, it must have been trapped wind", but sooner or later something didn't feel right, and it felt potentially dangerous - dangerous as in to continue thrashing around on my bed, trying to get to sleep, and not going to the toilet. I did end up going to the toilet, and passed quite a lump plus a lot more wind. I felt comfortable enough to get back to sleep after that.

  I'm not sure that I slept all that well afterwards, but I did sleep. I didn't seem to wake very often, and I seemed to go for a pee far less than usual. That might have indicated my blood glucose was nice and low, but as I discovered later, that was not so. I have a feeling I dreamed a lot last night, but I can only remember the important/interesting bit of a dream that seems very out of character for me.

  In the dream I seemed to be just a passive observer of what must have been something like an army cadet group. There was someone who probably had some high military rank, but because I have no idea what it was, or even what it could have been, I'll call him the boss. He had a problem with a very small budget to work from, and they had run out of bullets for the rifles they practised firing with. I was, in effect, looking over the bosses shoulder as he looked in a catalogue.

  It showed bullets at £2.09 for a box of 100. I thought that doesn't look too bad - that's just 21p per bullet, but then I started thinking like a boss. While one bullet may only cost 21p, each cadet needs to fire at least 10 during practice, and if there were 10 cadets that would use the whole box up in one session. In military terms £2.09 is barely a rounding figure in the real world, but these cadets were operating on a shoe string. Perhaps it was a school army cadet force, and the school was starved of money by the government - real life touches into a dream !

  After what seemed to be a bad night (although, with hindsight I may not have lost all that much sleep around midnight) I was sort of hoping I might sleep in to something like 11am. I am not sure if I have ever slept that late in my life, and I still haven't ! I started to slowly get up around 7am. For one thing, I needed to go to the toilet, and it was more than just a pee ! In fact I went twice more after that, and I still have doubts that I am empty even now. Where can it all be coming from ? Does my digestive system extend into the 5th dimension or something ?

  Maybe among all that there were food mistakes from 2 or more days ago. It is either that or a few of beers I drunk must have had a very high sugar content because my blood glucose had soared up to 9.3mmol/l this morning. It had been on a downward trend before this morning. In an ideal world this would steer my choices for today. For instance I should idealy fast until dinner time, and then have a very safe dinner, but I felt hungry and I have already eaten a pair of fish burgers (just the actual big square fishfingers that could go in a bun with stuff, but didn't).

  I should also go out in the gorgeous sunshine for a long walk. The trouble is that I keep imagining how wonderful it would be to ignore the icy air outside, and to lay on my bed, with the warm sunshine coming through the windows, and it feeling like I was laying on a hot sun kissed beach. I could read and doze off with no worries. Of course it is possible I could do both, and maybe I'll try and do that.
Just one of those random things that pop up from time to time: The pretty blue ashtray has been gathering dust in the corner of my bedroom for ages now. I can't remember when it was that the £1 coin changed from round to bi-octaganal (I think that might describe a 16 sided polygon, although I am not sure I counted the sides correctly), but I do remember that it took several months for Aldi to alter their shopping trolleys to take the new coin. Eventually the coins in the ashtray were no loner needed, and it was sitting there gathering dust until I noticed it yesterday, and had a look to see how many old coins there were. I thought I had given it a fair dusting before taking the picture, but evidently not !