This morning is definitely looking wet, and the latest revision to the weather forecast shows even more hours featuring rain. It might be dry between 10am and midday, and then from 1pm to 7pm, but every other hour shows rain. All of it shows light rain, and most hours it is shown as a 50% or less chance of rain, and so some of those times it might not rain, but it looks to be a 100% grey day ! Most of the day will be just 8° C. For now it is looking like tomorrow may be the same as today.

  I probably should have done more yesterday. If only the weather forecast had reflected what reality turn out to be, i.e. loads of sunny spells, I might have gone out for a short to medium sized walk, or perhaps just a trip to the shops. The trouble was that I believed the miserable weather forecast, and programmed my expectations for the day accordingly. There were two things I had to do, and I did do then, but otherwise I was generally lazy.

  The first task of the day, once I had finished writing what I wrote yesterday, was to deal with the washing I had left soaking for almost 24 hours. I needed it, or the big builders bucket it was in, out of the bath so I could have a shower - something that didn't actually happen. That soapy water was cold and horrible, but once I had wrung out each item of clothing I could to the rinsing, and fabric conditioning in hot water.

  Once I had hung up that washing, indoors on a clothes horse, and had a short rest, I could tackle the problem of trying to find some decent pictures I had taken on Chain in The Partridge pub on Saturday night. I was only there for about 20 minutes, and it felt like I had hardly taken any pictures, let alone decent pictures, but I was a bit wrong. I had managed to take more usable pictures than I thought.

  When I say usable I really mean technically usable, but as I thought, there were few that were "artistically" good. However, I can use a photo editor to fairly good effect, although not as good as the skilled hands of a professional Photoshop user (I use The Gimp - it is free, and for photo editing it can do almost as much as the very expensive Photoshop). I took 37 snaps at the gig, and some of those were burst shots of 2 or more. With a few tweaks I managed to produce a photo album of 12 photos. I have to admit that only a couple I would consider good.
  This was actually the first picture I took once I had entered the pub, and pushed my way to the front. I took this snap very quickly before the man who annoys me a lot decided to stand in front of me, always hogging the best positions for photography. Fortunately I tend to move around a lot, and I was soon at the other end of the "stage". Actually there is no stage. The band plays on one side of the pub, and so there is a gap between them and the long bar of about 8ft - and that gap very quickly fills up with heaving bodies.
  It was one of those nights when I wished I had brought a wider angle lens. Fortunately the single lens I did take was a small zoom lens that was almost wide enough most times, and had enough zoom for a few close ups. This, and the previous picture needed very little work to make them look presentable. I think I slightly brightened the picture of Steve Pitt, on bass guitar, and Chris Mayer, on lead guitar, because I was trying to keep the power of my flash gun down to a minimum. One bit of editing I often have to do is to make Chris' face look less red. I never looks red to the eye, but the camera always seems to see it as rather red.

  In a peculiar way I was quite enjoying using all the photo editing tricks I have learned over the years. For most of the last two years my photographs have been taken mostly outside in daylight, during my walks. Those photos needed hardly any work to make presentable. Most just needed cropping, and maybe a bit of straightening up. Gig photos, usually taken under adverse lighting conditions, can need far more work. Sometime I like to "paint out" things on the edge of the picture if they look obtrusive or silly. Selective lightening and darkening can also transform a flat picture into something more vibrant.

  With the photo editing done I lost interest in doing anything of any significance, and resorted to reading and the like. I also took time out to eat. All I had for breakfast was a handful of peanuts. My lunch was two bowls of instant noodles. A bit later in the afternoon when I had few distractions from feeling like eating, I had some cheese on a thick spread of Marmite on rice cakes. I haven't had anything like it for ages, and I have to admit as a sort of rare treat it was delicious.

  I believed I hadn't slept well the night before last, and I expected to snooze a lot during the afternoon. I think I probably had at least one snooze, but I can't really be sure. I can remember listening to music with my eyes closed, but I wasn't really aware that I had gone to sleep. Maybe there were a few blips in time that would indicate I did sleep, but it all seems so vague now.

  I was more alert and aware of what was going on as dinner time approached. My original plan was to make a sort of beef stew with vegetables, but I was hanging on for a shopping trip where I would buy some onions. I never went shopping, and so the stew was never made. What seemed like a good idea was two packets of southern fried favoured fish burgers. That wasn't the buns and salad and stuff, but just the fish that would go in such. They come from Aldi, and are best likened to a large square fish finger. I had 4 of them, and nothing else for dinner.

  Apart from a single half hour of The Simpsons, a repeated episode I could remember in some detail, there was little on TV to amuse me last night. There was one programme that I also watched despite knowing I would hate it. It was an American documentary type thing about underground structures. I stress that it was American made, or at least designed for showing on American TV because it was devised so it could be split into 10 minute segments to allow for a crazy amount of commercial breaks. We didn't see adverts that frequently, but so much of it was repeating bits in case the audience couldn't remember what was happening after their brain was addled by long adverts.

  It was a half hour programme on British TV, but I can imagine it was given a one hour slot in America. If that wasn't bad enough it had a three minute introduction that contained most of the interesting content that would fill the entore programme, as well as enough information to reconstruct most of the programmes in the series. The full content included loads and loads of jarring edits between segments, and loads of repeated "travelling camera" shots. If I were a professor of "media studies" and one of my students had handed it in, I would have given it a D-.

  I read in bed, but not for long before I turned out the light, and it wasn't long before I was asleep. It was quite warm in my bedroom with the heater on low, and so it seemed comfortable to sleep barely covered. In the small hours I decided it was getting a bit too cool, but rather than cover myself with the duvet I turned the heater up. It does seem that I sleep better without having to fight the duvet all night. It seemed like, and this morning I think it feels like I had a very nice sleep last night.

  This morning, being the first of the month, I hoped that my blood glucose reading would be low enough to start what I hope will be a series of low readings leading to another record low monthly average. It wasn't quite as low as hoped, but 7.6mmol/l is only 0.1 above my target, and perfectly good enough to start the month. I can't go as far as to say I feel good this morning, but I think I feel better than many mornings.

  The day started with miserable weather, and the sky remains very gloomy. I want to go shopping today, but I can't really imagine doing any more than that. I suspect I will be spending at least some of the day doing computer housework. That will include doing more with my ever growing train photos catalogue spreadsheet. I also have a lot of mp3 files to sort into their correct file system hierarchy - correct to my own theory of a filing system. Maybe I might do some more CD ripping, although I have a feeling I must have done my entire collection now, but I may find the odd escapee.