The latest revision to the forecast has moved the sunny spells for 11am to 10am, and now there is a gap of 3 hours before the sun comes out again at 2pm. With luck it will turn out closer to yesterday which was sunny almost all day.  This afternoon the temperature should reach 9° C - which may feel almost OK when in the sun. Clear skies tomorrow will bring non stop sunshine, but the maximum temperature may only be 4° C !

   Yesterday felt like it was a good day. I was productive enough to believe that, although I will admit I also enjoyed a lot of laziness. The fact that it was mostly a sunny day helped a lot, although being a very cold sunny day it didn't lure me to do anything outdoors except a brief shopping trip.

  One good thing happened fairly early, and that was to have a shower, and to wash my hair. I wrote yesterday that my hair was feeling a bit yucky, and needed washing. Once I had finished using the bathtub for washing my hair and showering I put some clothes in to soak in detergent. Later in the day I gave those clothes the full laundry treatment, and hung the clothes up to dry in front of a desk fan in the front room.

  In the interval between putting the clothes in to soak, and all the rinsing, plus fabric conditioner, I actually ventured into the great outdoors to go shopping in the little multi-cultural supermarket on Catford Bridge. I noted, but didn't buy any of the extra strong garlic sausages. I mentioned them to Michael because he likes that sort of thing. I did consider buying him one, but I was worried he would make sandwiches with it, and eat them in front of Jodie during our Thursday beer session. I didn't fancy having to drink with all the windows and doors open so Jodie didn't gag on the stink.


  The main thing I wanted to buy was more instant noodles. It seems that Poland, and maybe another Eastern European country have taken to instant noodles in a big way, and make them with far more interesting flavours than the mock Chinese takeaway flavours that the UK/US companies attempt, and usually fail in a big way. I think I bought 8 packets.

  I also bought the extra hot pepper sauce pictured on the left. As far as I recall I have never tried this one before. It will be interesting to see how "extra hot" it is, and whether it has an interesting flavour.  Four more things I bought were those little snack pots of chick peas and feta cheese, and couscous with chargrilled vegetables.

  Finally, the other thing which was on my shopping list before I got to the shop was some beer - strong beer. I bought two cans of Karpackie 9% beer (pictured above), and two cans of another strong Polish beer (whose name escapes me as I write this). With my rucksack nicely loaded I headed for home.

  I didn't do anything when I first got home except to eat a pack of Turkish marinated, thinly slice, beef. I now realise it is better in a sandwich, but I am avoiding sandwiches again now. It was sort of nice as a solo snack, but.....



  Half the afternoon had passed by before I went and continued my experiments/playing with the tiny 12 volt powered PC. The previous day I had left it with it's new 2TB hard disk installed, and a fresh installation of Devuan Linux that wouldn't boot after the installation was complete. I initially tried the rescue (Rescatux) disk to try and repair the boot loader, but even that didn't work. By that time I had a good idea what might be wrong.

   On all previous installations of other Linuxes I have never had to worry about deliberately setting the boot flag (a bit set on the hard disk to say that partition can be booted). I think most installers do that for you, but apparently not Devuan. I erased the whole disk, and then made new partitions. I set the boot flag on the partition that would have the operating system on it, and did a fresh installation of Devuan, and lo and behold, it worked perfectly.

  It was still at least 90 minutes before dinner time, and I had time to install all the extra programs I wanted, and to customise the desktop how I like it - like Windows XP, but with a Windows 7 start button. That didn't take long, and so I started to copy all my CD rips to the "Music" directory. That took a while, and I went away to cook my dinner. Once I had eaten my dinner I started copying all my photos to the "Pictures" directory. There is an awful lot of them, and I left it copying them overnight.

  I had started yesterday with a breakfast of two bowls of instant noodles. The thing I am realising about that breakfast is that it stops me feeling hungry for most of the day. That is surprising for what feels like a small snack. I did have some nuts yesterday while waiting for stuff to happen on the PC, and I did have that sliced beef, but otherwise nothing more until dinner.

  Dinner was battered cod with tinned garden peas. The cod was not as nice as the cod in beer batter I had eaten a day or two previously, and one piece of the cod seemed to have a very mild unpleasant taint to it (which reminds me of something I'll mention soon). I don't think that bit of cod was "off", but it was definitely not as nice as the other bit. A little later I had a small pot of chick pea salad followed by 3 little easy peeler oranges.

  The thing which came to mind  when writing about the cod being tainted in some way was that I tried a can of Aldi's "Chicken in white sauce" as a soup a day or two ago (It was probably Monday). I have to say it wasn't very nice. I am wondering if the "taint" might just have been a hint of Thyme, but it might equally have been a taint of disinfectant. I wonder if it was made with the infamous American chlorine washed chicken or something. The worst thing is that I have another can to get through before I never try one again (although I might see if Tesco does something similar, but better).

  I watched some TV last night, but I passed on watching the 8pm showing of QI on Dave. I was feeling quite tired, and I started heading for bed - but only to read in bed for a while. As 9pm approached I was yawning, and my eyelids were drooping. I put my book down, turned out the lights, and then.....nothing ! I just couldn't seem to relax and get comfortable. After an hour I got up for 20 minutes, and went on line.

  One thought going on in my head was to see if "second user", aka "renewed", PC monitors were available from Amazon. There are ! I found some very basic 17 inch, ex-office, Dell monitors for £35, and some bigger monitors for £75. The latter looks to be potential quite good, and maybe I will order one as a spare next month, but not last night.

  I think I eventually got to sleep soon after 11pm, and from then on I slept almost OK. I was often feeling uncomfortable in some way or another every time I woke up, but I think I managed to get enough sleep. I even managed to lay in for half an hour - unintentionally ! I think I was woken up again by a text message. I don't recall hearing it, but it had only arrived a minute or so before I woke up. It was to say my new PC would be delivered between 8am and 9pm.

  Before all that I had to go to the toilet, and get dressed enough to answer the door when the courier arrived. I also checked my blood glucose. I thought it might have gone up again after yesterday's little rise, but it had gone down to right onto my self set target of 7.5mmol/l. That was really good, and now my running average for the month is below the average for the whole of last year - and that was after a terrible start to January !

  The courier arrived at about 8.20am. It was bigger than expected, and although I was fairly keen to go to the toilet for a poo, I opened the box to see what I had bought. I guess in the general scale of things it was a small form factor PC, but I really wanted a mini PC. I paid £47 for it so it won't go to waste ! Also in the box was a brand new USB WiFi dongle, and a little bag of Hariboo "star mix" (probably the one that has laxative properties !).
  This is the basic description of the PC I bought. It has a Windows Vista licence sticker on it, but I believe that licence will also activate Windows 10. I have no desire to use Windows 10, but maybe I am curious enough to see what it looks like. This is the third PC I have bought with Windows 10 on it, but I have never used the little hard disk with it on, and fitted a bigger hard disk, and installed Linux. I think this time I will boot it up, and see what it is all about - before I take out, or overwrite the hard disk.

  It is good that the PC arrived this morning. I had fears it would arrive early in the afternoon, and that would spoil my day a lot. It's Wednesday, and all being well I shall be meeting Angela for a drink at lunchtime. I do have another small packet that should be arriving today via Royal Mail. If the postman hasn't arrived by the time I have to go out it won't matter too much. At least with Royal Mail it is only a 1.5 mile round trip to the sorting office to pick it up tomorrow morning - a useful bit of exercise !