Once again I seem to have little to write about yesterday. The very dull weather didn't inspire to do much - either outdoors or indoors. I hardly did anything in the morning, but just before midday I went out to get a bit of shopping in Tesco. I was mainly after topping up my soup stocks, but I also fancied something nice. With my blood glucose so low (or normal) I thought I at least deserved a packet of crisps.

  I did indeed buy a 6 pack of crisps instead of the single large pack I thought I might get. I also found a few things in the reduced price cabinet that I couldn't resist buying. One item was an "oriental starters" - sesame seed toast, mini spring rolls, and dumpling type things. Another was a sausage casserole with mashed potato on it like a shepherds pie. I also bought a Gingsters "peppered steak slice", a couple of Scotch eggs and even more bird food.

  My original intention was to come back and start eating a big bag of crisps while perusing the internet. I didn't have a big bag of crisps, although I could have had a small packet or two, but I ate the peppered steak slice while heating up the oriental starters. Once upon a time those peppered steak slices actually had some diced beef in them. It was often a bit gristly, and/or fatty, but you could believe it was steak. "Mechanically recovered meat" is not a substitute, and a lack of pepper is not a substitute for pepper ! I give that peppered steak slice about 2 out of 10, and only that high because it wasn't actually horrible.

  The "oriental starters" were not very good either. The sesame seed on toast was tasty, but rather oily. The dumpling type things seemed like they should have been nice, and maybe would have been if the filling was something with a strong taste, but they were really just rather bland. Maybe they would have been better if dipped in Hoisin sauce. The mini spring rolls were too small to have much inside, and what they did have was hard to discern. There was something in them that had a very vague vegetable taste, but like everything I ate, except the sesame toast, for that strange lunch, it was just very bland.

  It was certainly gone 3pm before I was ready to face the my newest, old, PC that I am currently playing with. There were several possibilities to try yesterday, and one was 1TB hard disk that I pre-partitioned with partitions for Windows and Devuan Linux. I did successfully install Windows XP on it after changing some BIOS settings, but once installed it seemed very sluggish. It took a long time to install service packs 2 and 3.

  When that was done I went into the BIOS and installed the optimal defaults. That made Windows a bit faster, but at least it still booted, and at that time it was running without the correct drivers. I thought I would come back to it later after I had tried installing Devuan Linux on it. That seemed to be running fast enough, even running as a live CD. I started the installer, and that seemed fairly fast until it got to the stage where it installs the bootloader. It got stuck at the point, and I knew it was messing up the Windows loader as well as not installing the loader for Devuan.

  Even Rescatux could not get Windows booting again, and I gave up at that point. All my experience suggests that Devuan has a very unforgiving installer. If everything is not 100% as expected it just makes a mess of things. If I had time today I would probably try installing Linux Mint on the Linux partitions, and see if it's installer would find Windows XP, and add it to the boot loader menu.

  It took 35 minutes in the mini oven/grill to cook that sausage casserole pie that I mentioned above. With hindsight I would have left it even longer, and put it a little higher in the oven so the potato topping got nicely browned. It might have been the only thing that would have improved the flavour. I suppose it was a bit much to expect that the sausages would not be the same rolls of clay as used for the cans of baked beans and sausages that have been horrible since they were first introduced 50 years ago. In this case the "sausages" were thinly sliced into disks, but still tasted like clay. The only thing with a strong taste were the carrots - used a cheap filler.

  I was so disappointed by my dinner. It was made worse by the thought that it could not have been good for me. In fact I expected it to be very bad for me. That did not stop me finally opening the 6 pack of crisps, and eating two packs a bit later in the evening. Now they were nice and tasty, although I am unsure how their taste had anything to do with the taste of Kentucky Fried Chicken - as the writing on the packet said they were supposed to be.

  I can think of good things and bad things to say about my sleep last night. It started off a bit bad in so much as it seemed to take ages before I fell asleep. I woke up several time in the night - as is not standard these days. One one occasion my neck, at least I think it was my neck, made a loud pop as I moved it. It seemed like a bad thing, but it didn't hurt, and there seemed to be nothing more after it had happened.

  I think it was a little before 1am when I woke up for a pee. I went and had my pee, and got back in bed. I lay there for about 5 minutes and thought "oh no, not again". I needed another pee. So I got out of bed again, and then I noticed the time. That apparent 5 minutes I had been laying in bed must have been almost 3 hours of dreamless sleep ! Last night was a night when not only can't I remember any dreams, but I can't to remember having any dreams at all. I have to admit that can't be entirely true because I do seem to have a faint memory of a shadow of an idea that I had some sort of dream, but when and what has just evaporated.

  After all the crap food I ate yesterday I was expecting my blood glucose to have gone up a lot this morning. It has indeed gone up, but only to 7.3mmol/l. By my typical standards that is still quite low, and once again my monthly running average has gone down to a new low. With still a week to go, it is looking possible that I could score the lowest end of month since records began (which was only in October 2019 when I started using a spreadsheet, and calculating an end of month average).

  My agenda for today is pretty much laid out already. One of the next things I will do will be to wash my hair and have a shower. Then I need to clear the computer stuff off the dining room table, and give the table a quick clean. Then, at about 3.30pm, I should be having a beer session with Jodie. It could be good or bad because we will be going through some of the more exotic beers today. Some are from micro breweries who produce some pretty weird stuff that many would say is not beer at all !