My thermometers tended to agree that at 7am the temperature was less than 1° C. Two of them said 0.6° C, and the frost on all the cars outside rather confirms to was bloody cold ! A day of uninterrupted sunshine will raise the temperature, but only to 10° C, the same as yesterday, and that still felt very chilly in the shade of my garden. The prediction for tomorrow is that it will be the same as today but 1° cooler. It is not until the day after when the temperature might rise to 11° C, but it will be a very dull day, and might even include a splash of rain. A more correct forecast for that day (Monday) will be issued well after the day, and weather, has actually started (and even then may not to 100% correct).
  Not being able to see Angela for another lunchtime drink with her made for the possibility of a bad day, but in fact I had a good way - just in a different way.  It was a day when I did two lots of laundry (by hand), and for the second lot I dared to hang that washing on the washing line to dry in the sunshine - except it was only the towel hung nearest the back fence that saw any sunshine.
  Ignore the clock on this screenshot. The cameras internal clock doesn't know if it is summer or winter, or even if it is London or the next time zone along. The actual time of the screenshot was 12:10, and it shows the shadow of the house on the back fence, and a bit of sunshine actually hitting the ground where the peak of the roof is further back than the back extension of my house. It will be several weeks until the sun is high enough in the sky to bathe the back flower bed in sunshine, but for a little while the dark looking towel (actually navy blue) is getting some sunshine.

  The next thing I did, and not too long after I hung that washing out, was to do some gardening. I had seeds and bulbs to plant, and I realised I had the perfect tool for it - an old broom handle. It was perfect for pushing a hole into the soil, and for pushing the soil back into the hole. This time I managed to get some seeds deep enough that the pigeons couldn't eat them ! Before planting I had to clear the third flower bed - the one on the left of the garden, and the side which only gets a bit of sunshine in the morning - and then not for quite a few weeks yet.
  This is the cleared flower bed. I have made it a bit bigger than last year. It now includes the area that was the entrance to to the foxes earth. I lightly blocked the entrance several months ago, and there has been no attempt to open it up again (like happened a few years back). I have assumed it is no longer used, and covered the depression with soil. I then planted a small selection of bulbs and seeds. I have my doubts they will thrive unless they come into flower late in summer when that side of the garden does get several hours of sunshine.

  I also planted some seeds in the flower bed by the back fence. That was dahlias, and giant sunflowers. The seeds were sent to me by Jo, from Chain. I know that sunflowers can grow there because I had one great big one last year, and several smaller ones. I can't remember when I planted the seeds for those last year, but I think it was possibly already summer. The early autumn winds then tried to blow them down, and it managed it except for one that I tied to the fence. I hope that by planting the seeds now, they may grow in the summer, and be able to thrive - and this year I will be ready to tie them to the fence if they start to droop.
  These were the bulbs I planted in all three flower beds. Most were in the newly cleared bed, but some where in the bed on the right hand side of the garden. I cleared that bed on 14th December last year, and planted some dwarf and full sized tulips, plus some other stuff. Some of those bulbs are sprouting nicely, although one looks like it has been stepped on by a cat. I hope it can recover. The rest of the earth in that flower bed is mostly clear, but a few sprigs I could definitely identify as weeds and I used my dibber (old broom handle) to push those weeds down, and planted bulbs on top of them.

  If I am lucky, and it will be luck because I have no real idea of what I am doing, I will have a fair bit of colour in my garden at some points this year. Meanwhile, just before I was about to go out in the garden, there was a ring at my doorbell. It was the postman, and he brought my second Nikon Coolpix S6300 that I had dared to buy from Ebay.
  I was very wary about buying from Ebay. I half expected it not to arrive, or if it did it would prove to be faulty in some way. It has definitely lead a harder life than the first one I bought, for three time the price, from Amazon, but apart from a few knocks, it is in perfect working order, and came with the box and all accessories. It was a far better deal than from Amazon. I only bought the camera from Amazon because it does seem to be a rare camera to find on the secondhand market - probably because it is such a great camera.

  One interesting thing is that it still had a used memory card in it. All but one photo had been erased, but I was naughty and used a Linux programme on my Linux PC called Testdisk on it. Teskdisk is a command line program, and so not to everyone's taste, and one part of it can be called with the command photorec. This is for recovering lost photos (and other files) from damaged or deleted memory cards. I found loads of pictures about vintage car restoration. There were loads of pictures of piles of dusty machinery, but also some nice pictures of fully restored vintage cars.

  It is easy to give a precise list of everything I ate up to 4pm yesterday. In the morning my blood glucose was higher than I wanted (although not high at all compared to most of the last two years or more), but I am setting myself new targets or aims now, and so I fasted until 4pm. By then my stomach was growling a lot. I took my second load of pills for the day, and one of them is a cod liver oil capsule. It wasn't long before I was tasting that fishy oil, and I decided not to wait any more before I ate something. That something was a very large handful of chilli flavour peanuts.

  Two hours later I had my dinner - which by original intention would have been my first and only meal of the day. It was to be diced lamb cooked in lamb stock with extra herbs and spices (aka mint and chilli sauces), and broccoli. I then had this idea that I might like some potato in it as well. Last Thursday I was telling Jodie that I still had some potatoes stored in a covered bucket in the kitchen, and it was from there that I selected a couple of potatoes. They would have made excellent seed potatoes because they had already sprouted, and some of the sprouts were very long ! I selected two medium sized spuds, and cut off some damaged bits before thickly slicing them into the casserole dish with the lamb for more cooking.

  It should have been a rather dinner dinner, and while there was nothing wrong with it, it somehow didn't match expectations. Maybe lamb just doesn't go with broccoli. Anyway, apart from the earlier peanuts, it was the only thing I ate yesterday. With the stock/gravy included it was a fair sized meal, and I felt full enough to not want any more. I then settled down to watch the last hour of the original Thunderbirds film. It was the one made in 1966, and so wasn't crap, although including The Shadows and Cliff Richard in puppet form was a bit cringeworthy !

  When the film ended I turned off the TV, but I did think I might turn it on later for an old repeat of QI on Dave. In the end, after reading for an hour or more, I decided on an early night. It wasn't that early, but I think I was asleep around 9pm. Apart from maybe 45 minutes of insomnia for some unknown reason at 3am, I slept very well. My sleep seemed so good that when I woke up close to 6am I had a pee, refreshed the weather forecasts on my PC, and then went back to bed for another half hour, or more, of sleep. When I got up at about 7.30am, if I recall correctly, my right hand had pins and needles. That was also the case several times in the night too.

  This morning my blood glucose was back down from 8.7 to 7.6mmol/l. That was very satisfactory. It could have been lower still if I had not included the potato in my dinner, but it is nice to know I can tolerate some potato now and then.  I seemed to have a good sleep, and my blood glucose is adequately low, but I don't actually feel that good in some specific ways. Those ways are, of course, to do with my gardening yesterday. It wasn't all planting seeds. There was also bending over to pull up weeds, and some digging involved. Most of the digging was to transport soil to fill in the entrance of the old foxes earth, and some for lesser things like getting the added brick border settled in. Some assorted muscles gently ache, and for some reason my hips feel stiff and painful when trying to sit in some positions.

  There are a couple of things I might do today, although at the moment I don't have any confidence that I will do any of them. The first thing would be to go to a protest/demo about government cuts to the NHS, and in particular, Lewisham Hospital. It is being held between 11am and 1pm by the Clocktower in the middle of Lewisham. What caught my eye, and why it could make for a good photo opportunity, is that there will be a singer accompanied by some sort of backing there. It starts in 40 minutes as I write this, and as yet I am not even washed and dressed !

  The other thing I think I want to try harder to do is not one, but two gigs tonight. At 8.30pm, at The Swan And Mitre pub in Bromley, Whitestar will be playing. It could get quite crowded in there, but my plan is only to spend about half an hour in there. 3 or 4 minutes of fast walking along the road is The Partridge pub where Chain will be beginning a gig at 9pm. The idea is that I will also spend half an hour there too. Chain will probably start late, and I might be able to see Jo and thank her for the seeds she sent me. I find the Partridge to be a horrible pub because I hate dense crowds, and it can get very busy in there when there is a gig on. Maybe with Whitestar and Chain on the same night the crowds will be split between the two, and maybe, just maybe, I may stay longer. I might even go back and forth between the two pubs several times, but first I have to somehow find the right move to want to go out so late (for me) at night (and it will be getting quite cool tonight !).