Today has started off nice and bright, and it should stay this way until 1pm. 2pm and 3pm will feature rain, but after that there could be more sunshine. It will be a cool day with the temperature not going above 10° C, although having said that, it seems to be 10° C now, over an hour early. Maybe we will see 11 or even 12° C later. It is rare for the forecast to get the temperature wrong, but it does happen. (Of course the forecasts get everything else wrong quite frequently !).  The main feature tomorrow is an amber warning for strong winds. As well as any damage they may do, they will also blow away any warmth, and make the maximum of 10° C feel very chilly. There will probably be a fair bit of rain in the very early morning, but some of tomorrow could be sunny.
  I guess most of yesterday could be classified as a good day. The morning was bright and cheerful, although I did little more than get myself ready to go out to meet Angela. "Getting ready" involved the full shave, shampoo and shower. The first cracks in the goodness of the day came when I had barely got as far as the entrance to the park when the sun went in, and that was just about the last time it was seen yesterday.

  It was doubly inconvenient to lose the sunshine. For one thing I went out with bare arms, and I was hoping to make a start at losing my winter colour. It also made it feel rather cooler than I hoped for, but at least it was still comfortable. The other reason why it was so inconvenient was that I was taking my recently bought, secondhand, Nikon Coolpix S6300 for a walk in the park. I was sure it would still do a good job in the dimmer light, and indeed it did, but all the picture lack the sparkle that sunshine would have given them.
  One of the first pictures I took was of these parakeets high up in a tree. The extra (x10) helped a lot to "see" near the top of a tree (albeit a heavily pruned tree), and the fast shutter speed has avoided and motion blur. The grey sky is almost bleached white, but the colour of the birds has been maintained. This is exactly what I expected, and why I bought another of these great cameras.
  I didn't find any daffodils in flower in the park, but in a week or two the riverbank at the Ladywell end of the park is going to be thick with daffodil flowers.
  I never know what to call it - it is part of the park, but it's a small triangular piece of ground on the other side of the river bordered by on the other two sides by footpaths.One footpath comes down from Ladywell Road, and the other connects the bridge over the river, and the start of the footpath behind St Mary's Church. Anyway, as well as a whole carpet of snowdrops, there are are also quite a few crocuses to be seen.
  Alongside the path through the graveyard by St Mary's Church there is a lot of wild garlic. I could smell it as I walked past....at least I thought I could, but it was probably coming from a patch of ground on the other side of a few tombs where a couple of gardeners were removing a big patch of wild garlic where there should have just been grass.
  It was by the south facing, but still slightly sheltered, side of the church where I found these daffodils in full bloom.

  I arrived at the pub a bit early, but it wasn't long after that Angela arrived. We had our usual two drinks, but we were distracted by Asia, the barmaid struggling to set up a new BT router that arrived in the post that morning. It seems that BT disconnected the old modem/router prematurely, and the pub had no internet connection, and thus couldn't take card payments - not that paying cash bothered me, I actually prefer it.

  It transpired that Angela had had a new box delivered by BT as well, and she was curious as to how it was all set up because she was going to have to do the same thing herself at home. This would result in a few phone calls in the early evening asking for advice. It also meant we had less time to talk about whatever we talk about when together in the pub. All too soon Angela's hour was up (it was actually more like 75 minutes !), and it was time to walk Angela back to work.

  I don't need to walk Angela back to work, but it is a way to spend a few extra minutes together. It was while walking back that we felt the first of the rain. At that time it was very fine rain, little more than a sort of dampness on the face, but it would pick up a bit as I continued to walk home. There was still not enough rain to get me damp, but I decided to walk home as fast as I could. With two pints of Guinness swilling about inside of me I didn't feel able to go that fast, but I pushed myself as hard as I could, and while I didn't break any records, I thought I had endured the discomfort well.

  The first thing I did when I got home was to pull the brown wheelie garden waste bin through the house, accompanied by lots of little fruit flies, out onto the pavement outside for collection today.  It would be the first time it had been emptied for maybe close to 12 months, and it was solid with compost, and bloody heavy. I was concerned that the bin men might complain, or refuse to move it, but it was emptied earlier this morning without apparent complaint.

  It's hard to say why, but I didn't feel all that good yesterday afternoon. It wasn't the usual misery of coming down from the high of seeing Angela, although there was some of that, and I don't think it was the result of struggling with that very heavy garden waste bit, although wouldn't have helped. Part of the problem was the weird situation of feeling very hungry, but not wanting to eat.

  I still had my single tin of soup for lunch, but while selecting and editing pictures (and a short pointless video) I topped up on some redskin peanuts. When the photography was finished I also had a nice juicy orange, and I had only just finished that, and rinsed my hands when Angela phoned about her new router. She sent me a picture of the instructions, and what she described she had done seemed to match those instructions but the thing would not seem to work.

  I found it difficult to see just what the whole exercise was supposed to achieve, but later on I concluded it was a matter of future proofing the installation. The situation was that she was to continue to use the modem part of the old router, but it was to be connected by ethernet to the new box. The new box then acts as the WiFi access point, a three point router, and it has a socket to plug a telephone in that won't be used yet.

  That telephone socket was the clue to what it might be all about. Sometime in the near future BT will be replacing the traditional copper wire connection back to the telephone exchange with a fibre-optic connection. That will require a new modem. With the new set up the new modem will replace the old, and it will just be a matter of swapping the ethernet cable from the old to the new. With no wire back to the exchange for the landline telephone, that phone will now be plugged into the new box. It all sort of makes sense.

  However, Angela could not get it to work, and there was little I could do to advise her over the phone. I got her to describe again what she had done, and it seemed right. It felt really annoying to let her down, but there was nothing more I can do. She sent me a text a bit later to say she had booked a BT (or Openreach) technician to come and sort it out on Friday.

  Last nights dinner should have been nice, but I didn't really enjoy it. It was oven and grill cooked pork belly strips. I think some of the problem is that I cooked them too fast, and although the fat went crunchy, and I poured off a huge amount of fat, they still tasted fatty - and it seemed to be fat without taste. I had them with cauliflower and a bit of beef gravy made with the water I had cooked the cauliflower in.

  It wasn't long afterwards that I made a potential mistake. I had the last two juicy oranges I had as a dessert. They were sweet, and presumably had a fair bit of sugar in then. After dinner I watched a bit of TV, but I felt tired after my bad sleep the night before. I watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and when that finished at 8pm I made preparations for bed. After going to bed I read for a while, but I had turned the light out, and I was asleep by 9pm.

  I did have good sleep last night, although I have to confess that after all the aches of the previous night I took a couple of Paracetamol before going to sleep last night. My sleep was probably aided by the warm temperature in my bedroom. It wasn't a cold night last night, and the heater on low was keeping my room warm enough that I didn't feel too cold if I kicked the duvet off me. I had some inconsequential dreams, and seemed ready to get up just after 6.45am.

  I think I have to blame myself and the oranges for spoiling a good run of low blood glucose readings. The blame I put on myself was to eat them late at night, and the oranges for being nice and sweet and juicy. The actual figure I am complaining about was only 7.6mmol/l, and at any time in the last 2 years, except this month, it would be considered very good. It's just that I have done so much better just recently.

  Although I was up early, I did several other things before I started writing this. I've had breakfast, started ripping another CD on the dining room PC, and I have been a few houses down the road to rescue my now empty brown wheelie bin. At the moment it is parked in my front garden. I shall have to drag it through the house, into the back garden, a bit later.

  Today I just need to do a bit of light tidying up, and setting things up for a Thursday afternoon beer session - probably just with Jodie.