Today started bright with some long sunny spells, but the clouds are getting thicker, and the last sunny spell could be happening as I write this. The latest revision to the forecast shows white cloud for most of the day except at 3pm when dark clouds may dominate, and light rain is expected. Having just inspected the sky I see there is still a lot of blue to be seen, but it is mostly to the north and overhead, but maybe the sunny spells might continue for some time after all. It does feel very mild in my garden, and that tallies with my thermometers saying it is around 12° C at the moment. It should only be 10° C. Today may turn out better than the forecast predicts. The forecast for tomorrow is always very approximate (or worse), but it currently shows a day a bit like today, and that is always a safe bet.

  It must be the extra daylight, and maybe some sunshine and less chilly weather, but I seem to feel I've come out of the state that is about the closest humans can get to Hibernation. Yesterday seemed to be a busy day. Of course there was the bits I had ordered, and which came the day before yesterday to spur me on to doing useful stuff, but there was more to the day than doing the one job.
  This pictures shows just a part of what yesterday morning's work was all about. The job was to replace some ancient, and starting to crack up, door knobs, and replace them with something more modern looking (and easier to use with wet hands, or when carrying a lot). It was a bit more than that though because I also wanted to replace the latch and lock, although the lock was only an option.

  The problem was that the door handles I had ordered were designed to be screwed to both sides of the door, and to operate a latch embedded in the door itself. My carpentry skills (and available tools) are insufficient to hollow out the door for an embedded latch. That mean dismantling one door knob so I could just use the handle, and nothing else, to mount on the square bar that goes through from one side to the other.

  Doing that bit was simple, but the problem is that there is no grub screw, or something similar, to hold the handle onto that square bar. I had to drill holes in the side of the handle, and through the square bar to put screws in to hold everything together. Then there was the problem that the new lock/latch mechanism was almost, but not quite the same dimensions as the one I was replacing. The part where the square bar goes through was about 1mm offset, and the height of the key hole was slightly higher.

  The other annoyances were that the lock/latch mechanism was slightly higher that the old one, and I had to cut out a bit of door to fit it in. The most annoying thing was that the lock and latch bolts didn't go in the old latch plate, and I had to replace that too. It was designed for flush mounting, while the old one was recessed. I had to use far longer screws, and a stack of old nuts to raise the latch plate away from the door frame.

  In the end it was all done and working well apart from one thing. It was a bit stupid, but I tried to change the keyhole slot while the mechanism was screwed to the door. In doing so I think I bent the back of the mechanism, and the key would not turn from the outside. It required very little force to break the key off in the lock. It would only take four screws to be undone to take the mechanism off to inspect, and probably easily repair the problem, but I had had enough of it for one day.

   Maybe I'll do it before I clean and paint the door. It does look rather messy at the moment. Some of that mess was where I was trying to get all the paint off the push plate. I had been hoping to find it was embossed brass, but it is just embossed tin, and not really worth keeping. Meanwhile the paint stripper went everywhere ! Once the door is painted I now have a solid brass, and rather heavy, brass push plate that also features a semi naked Greek lady pulling grapes off a vine. The only trouble now is that I am sure there must be a better door than the kitchen door for it, but which door ???

  I felt quite hot and sweaty after my carpentry, metal working, and lock smithing, and thought I deserved a small rest before doing the next job. That job was to hand wash a t-shirt, a pair of lounge pants, and some underpants. It wasn't a big job, but on top of the previous one it did feel sufficiently "physical" to be almost hard work. Even once it was hanging up to dry I didn't rest for long before I started on something else.

  I took advantage of having some heat on in the front room, to speed up the drying of my washing, to get working on my latest PC. It is the Lenovo 58E desktop PC bought from Amazon for just £47.99. It is a couple of computer generations old, but in reality the improvement in computers has been very small over the last 10, or maybe even 15 years. Prior to that every year brought huge improvements. If it has one problem it is that it seems to bridge between an old and new design philosophy.

  I spent hours on it yesterday, and one thing I have proved to my own satisfaction is that it doesn't easily support 3TB hard drives. I had a couple of spares and installed one it it to replace a far smaller hard disk that I believe has Windows 10 on it, but I've never tried it. I tried lots of experiments on it, and I had a working installation of Windows XP on it, but trashed it when I installed Linux on almost the rest of the spare hard disk space. Some how the Linux installation must have overlapped onto the Windows installation.

  The Linux I was using, MX Linux, did work very nicely. I was going to put in a smaller hard disk, probably a 1.5TB, and install MX Linux on that, but first of all I tried to repair the broken Windows XP. That in turn broke the MX Linux installation. My final decision was to ignore windows, keep the 3TB hard disk, but only use 2.3TB of it, and do a fresh installation of MX Linux.

  It installed with no bother once I had worked out the rules for using that 3TB hard disk, and maybe 90 minutes later, perhaps 2 hours later I had the full installation done, all the software updates installed, all the extra software I wanted installed, and finally all my desktop customisations done. With that done I was able to put my feet up, but not before I decided to reward myself with a take away (partly because I had stopped to prepare any dinner, and couldn't be bothered to).

  I think I have found a rather good takeaway for shish kebabs. The two I ordered last night came with the salad separately. That makes heating them up in the microwave easy. Last night I had one chicken shish kebab, and a rather naughty, but hugely enjoyable "donor meat" and chips. That still leaves a lamb shish kebab for dinner tonight, and 12 chicken wings, probably also for dinner tonight, and the double portion of salad to have with both of them.

  There was good stuff on TV last night. I watched The Lavender Hill Mob - a film I always confuse with The Ladykillers because I think both were filmed around Lavender Hill (near Clapham Junction station). It seems The Ladykillers was actually filmed near St Pancras. After The Lavender Hill Mob I turned over to Sky Arts. They were showing another ELO concert, followed by a Yes concert. Both seemed better listened to than watched, so I watched a few bits now and then, but mostly listened. I can't seem to remember if I saw the closing credits for the Yes Concert, or if I turned off early to go to bed.

  I seemed to sleep well last night, and I didn't seem to have any annoying insomnia in the middle. I know I had some dreams, but there was one notable dream because I can't seem to work out if it was all dream, or the idea it gave was honed while awake. It was a silly idea that made me sort of internally giggle. If I wrote stuff for public consumption it might be the sort of thing I might weave into it. It was simply "The Lunar Housewives For Peace will be dropping empty red boxes on Earth today, but nuclear bombs tomorrow".  I suspect it is part based on something I dreamed, and then polished it up, if such a piece of nonsense can be polished, when I was awake.

  It was inevitable that eating chips late at night was going to mess up my blood glucose this morning, and they did. This morning it was up to 8.8mmol/l. That is still in the safe area, but very undesirable - particularly when I've had so many high-ish reading lately. I'm not sure I will be able to eat any better today for a much lower reading tomorrow morning. At least I won't be eating any more chips today !

  I've already been very slightly busy this morning. As well as all the routine stuff, much of which I might do after writing, I have done some very light gardening. It was just a bit of light weeding, but it started when I noticed at attempt had been made to dig up the blocked entrance to the old foxes earth. I suspect it was cat rather than a fox doing the work. A fox would probably not have stopped at just two pawfuls of earth moved. It did expose a small hole big enough for a rat to get through, but nothing else, and I blocked it off with a lump of concrete before pushing the disturbed soil back.

  There are only two things I think I'll be doing today. One is a definite - washing my hair and having a shower. The other always has an element of doubt. I think Jodie will be over this afternoon for another beer tasting session.  Other than that I may spend a bit of time on the Lenovo desktop PC, although it is now in a state where nothing more needs to be done to it, and with no immediate use for it* I will most probably ignore it until a good use becomes apparent.

* I had originally bought it to use as a new/spare firewall box, but it was bigger and heavier than I realised. It turned out to be almost the same size as a "traditional" PC - whatever that is ! I wanted something half the size, and a lot lighter so it could be sat on a shelf and almost forgotten about (apart from occasional software updates).