As can be seen from the screenshot above, the major feature today is very strong winds. By midday the wind gusts could hit 65 miles an hour, and a steady speed of 35 miles an hour. The Met Office have issued dire warnings of all sorts associated with these winds. At the moment the wind seems quite mild. The rain that was falling seems to have stopped now, and the sun seems to be trying to squeeze through the clouds - however, the latest revision the the forecast shows heavy rain and sunshine for 9am. Apart from a very grey sky around midday, the rest of the day could feature pure sunshine right up until sunset. Of course with strong winds the clouds could get moved and stirred up enough to make an accurate forecast impossible. One thing seems certain is that the temperature was at it's highest this morning at 10° C, and will probably slowly drop through the day to 4° C by 11pm. There will still be strong winds tomorrow, but not as strong as today, and the middle of the day may feature heavy rain. The temperature may be no more than 8° C - possibly after a frosty start.
  Yesterday was a quiet day compared to the day before. Apart from the beer session in the afternoon, that really ought to be called a beer tasting session, nothing of any great significance happened. I think "beer tasting session" is a more apt description because we didn't have any beer in large enough quantities to really knock it back in the quantities to enjoy it. This is just as well as some of the beers are tending towards the nasty, and a full pint would be too much.

  I think Jodie and I got through about 6 small (330ml) cans of beer, and that means we had about a quarter of a pint of each beer, and it adds up to little more than one and a half pints for the session (as I have explained a few times in the past). On some occasions I slip in a strong beer all to my self if Jodie is taking too long to drink her beer. She tends to sip it like wine, which is not the way to get the taste of beer, and keep stopping to consult, and enter her reaction in the untappd web site.

  I didn't have any strong beers to myself yesterday, and didn't even have more than half a shot glass of whisky at the end. I felt remarkably sober at the end of it. This was good because it made me sensible enough to not do something I had been considering earlier. That was to get a takeaway for dinner. I was even thinking along the lines of something very unhealthy like a Chinese or Indian !

  This morning I am glad I didn't take that path, and because I hadn't prepared anything earlier, I just had two cans of chunky soups  for dinner. They don't have the lowest sugar levels, but at the same time they are far from high. I had another can for lunch. My breakfast was a mistake. It was Katsu curry flavoured rice. I accidently bought it in Tesco because I thought it was a "pot noodle". I suspect that the rice was converted to a lot of sugar by the enzymes in my digestive processes.

  I went to bed twice in the evening. This was by design. I watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and it was the final episode of the series - and it was crap. The writers obviously could not think of a great story, and so relied on a lot of flashbacks, and a really shmaltzy (or however you spell that) flimsy back story. A decent editor could have cut the whole thing down to about 10 minutes ! Anyway, that ended, and I went to bed, at 8pm, to read for an hour before getting up, turning on the TV again to watch QI.

  After QI I went back to bed, and this time I didn't read for long before I turned out the light, and went to sleep. On the whole I slept well, but I did have one series of connected dreams that seemed to go on and on. The dreams were about going on a special rail journey to celebrate the last day of service of a particular type of train (a class 166 if you want to check it on Wikipedia - in reality they are still going very strong, and probably will for a good few years yet).

  The start of the dreams were about getting to the station where the train was due to depart from. That must have been at least 3 or 4 short dreams. I was with my friend Kevin for most of these dreams. We got to the train, and boarded it. We knew it would be a bit busy, and the front of the train was beginning to fill up so we moved to the carriage behind (it was only a 2 car train). Going from one carriage to another was like a film edit, and obviously one short dream had ended, and another began.

  The rear carriage was nothing like the front carriage. It was almost square inside, and not a long tube like all railway carriages are. It had a bizzare collection of seating that included a couple of bed. Kevin opted for a very bouncy chair, but it seemed to be in a corner where there was little to see. Having said that, I don't recall seeing out any windows of that rear carriage. I am not even sure it had any. I opted to sit on the bed because I thought it might be good in case I fancied a lie down on the journey.

  That lie down soon became impossible as more people boarded the train, and all seating places filled up. I was joined by a couple of girls (actually young women). I sort of fancied the one next to me, but I thought she wouldn't be interested in a sad old train spotter like me. Well maybe she would because she had come far more equipped than I had. She had maps and timetables, plus the full itinerary of the journey. She told me that the intention was to keep going for as long as the fuel held out, and that the ultimate aim was to get to Wales.

  Those are my strongest memories of that series of dreams, but I have vague recollections of a lot more, but eventually I woke up for a pee, and the dream never resumed. I probably had other dreams before I got up just before 7am. This morning has brought two disappointments. First of all my blood glucose reading is up again. It has only gone up a bit to 7.8mmol/l, but it is still disappointing even if I would have considered that very good a month or so ago.

  The other disappointment was that I found one of the amplifiers, for the left channel of my PC speakers, has died. I suppose it was to be expected because for many months I had noticed that the stereo channels were becoming unbalanced, but it was correctable by the balance control. Now the left channel has completely died. I expect it is repairable, and one day I may repair it, but this morning I have made yet another order with Amazon for a pair of Creative T10 speakers. I am sure that their price has dropped a lot since I bought the pair which I use in the dining room. I was almost tempted to go for the T15s which have bluetooth as well as a wired connection.

   I have a pair of those connected to the TV in the front room, and on rare occasions the bluetooth connection is useful. The T15s seems to be about half the price they used to be as well. When I think about it, I could easily have spent the £33 I am paying for the T10s on a big takeaway last night. That might have been two meals worth, and maybe a small third meal, but at the end all I would have would be a high blood glucose reading - possibly dangerously high.

  I have no grand plans for today. It is going to be mostly a case of watching storm Eunice going by, but if it does turn out that there will be a string of sunny hours I may be brave and take a camera out to look for storm damage in the park or somewhere.