Once again, the morning was brighter, and sunnier than the forecasts predicted, but the clouds got thicker from about 11am, and as I write this it is almost gloomy compared to how a lot of the morning looked. The most recent revision says midday and 1pm will be particularly dull, but the threat of rain has now been reduced to just 10%, and it will probably stay dry for the rest of the day. The chances of any sunshine are very remote for the rest of today, but it should brighten up a bit. Today's highest temperature is probably happening now, and by my reckoning it is around 12° C. Tomorrow should start with a lot of full sunshine, but the afternoon will probably just see white cloud with a temperature of 12° C.

  There were times yesterday when I felt rather good, maybe even smug, and I think I had some reason to. One such time was when Jodie used my new door handle on the kitchen door without even noticing it. That by itself was no great reason to feel good, but it was a trigger. It is taking ages and ages, but I am slowing improving my house and garden after years of neglect. The new door handles on the kitchen door was just one of those small improvements that slowly build up to a big thing.

  Another thing that felt good, but in a different was was when I looked up at the dining room ceiling, and saw where I had got paint on the ceiling while painting the wall. Sooner or later I need to paint that ceiling, and among the many things that put me off (trying to protect me and everything else from flying paint) there is one thing I realise is not necessary. To do a good professional job the ceiling needs preparing - washing down at minimum - but maybe not for a "good enough" paint job. The bit of paint on the ceiling I was looking at looks to have covered the old brown paint completely, and it was only one thin coat from where I missed the wall, and hit the ceiling with the roller.

  It is at times like this I wish the 99p was still in existence. One thing they used to sell that I have never noticed in any other local shops (although I could easily get them online) is cheap plastic ponchos. There are the sort of thing sold for outdoor festivals as protection from rain. It strikes me that they would also be great for when painting - particularly overhead because they have hoods. Having just checked I find I still have 4 unopened packs that have been stashed away for years. I think that should be more than enough for when I paint the dining room ceiling at some time in the indefinite future.
  My afternoon beer session with Jodie was fairly pleasant. We had a couple of really nice beers. One was a pear and cinnamon flavoured gose* beer. Another was apple and raisin flavoured, and a third was a very strong, 9.3%, apple strudel flavoured beer. It felt a shame that I had to share that last one with Jodie. It was really nice !

* Gose beer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gose

  After Jodie left (to meet friends at a pub for more beer !) I got my dinner ready. It was the last of my takeaway from Saturday night. I started with all the chicken wings - half in a sort of breadcrumb, and the other half just grilled. They were easy to heat up in the microwave. Part 2 was a lamb shish kebab with a double helping of salad. The meat and pitta bread came separate to the salad, and so it was simple to reheat the meat in the microwave. It was a very nice dinner. It was also quite healthy, but....

  It was the beer wot dun it - while drinking I opened up the packet of honey glazed cashews and peanuts that I had bought by accident ( I thought I had picked a packet of salted, and not honey glazed). My original intention was to wash all the sweet glaze of the outside before eating them, but I made the stupid mistake of, "oh well, a few won't matter". I had another few later after dinner while watching something on TV.

  I can't seem to remember what I watched on TV last night - it was that interesting ! I do know I watched the first 5 minutes of QI, but turned the TV off because the panellists didn't seem terribly exciting. It wasn't long after 9.30pm that I was fast asleep. I initially slept well. I think I had two long periods of sleep, but my room cooled down a bit. It would have been OK if it had cooled down a lot more. Unfortunately it only went down to a temperature that gave the old, old problem - still too warm under the duvet, and too cold without it.

  The next bit of sleep didn't last as long as the first two because I was trying to sleep partly uncovered.  It was probably around 4am when I decided it would just be easier to turn the heater up, and forget trying to use the duvet. That worked, and at almost exactly 7am I woke up feeling strangely refreshed. If I had not eaten those honey glazed peanuts and cashews, I may have had a bigger drop in my blood glucose, but 8.3mmol/l was better than yesterday's 8.8mmol/l.

  I've had a busy morning - somehow. I wasted some time catching up on some tech news, and then I had a shower. At the end of the shower I made a start on hand washing a couple of tea towels, and some bar towels. As I write this they are still soaking in detergent. Eventually I was ready to go out to Aldi to get some shopping.

  On the way I passed the tree on the left that was covered in blossom. As soon as I passed under the tree my nose started to run, although not pour, and I started to cough. It was the cough that was potentiallt the worst thing considering I was only a few hundred yards from Aldi. I did not want to go in there coughing and spluttering like I had Covid. Fortunately I stopped a few hundred feet from the store.

  It was definitely not planned, but I seemed to buy a lot of stuff from Aldi this morning. My runny nose on the way there reminded me to buy two boxes of tissues, and while I was at it I also bought a 9 pack of toilet tissue. A lot of what I bought was because I bought two of some things - two bags of bird feed quality peanuts, two bottles of mayonnaise and two lots of cider....No, actually it was a 4 pack of snall cans of fruit flavoured cider, and two large cans of fruit flavour cider.

  The trouble with those ciders is that they blatantly list sugar as part of the ingredients, and there is probably a lot of it in each can. I will have to drink them very carefully. The other heavy thing was the usual 3 x 2.25l bottles of Diet Coke. It is an odd size, and I don't think I have ever seen it anywhere except in Aldi.

  The rest of my shopping was probably not that unusual except that it was biassed towards fish instead of meat. There was one unusual thing I bought. It was an extending (to 3 metres) window washing gizmo. After I got home, and had put away all the food and drink, I tried out the thing to see if I could wash an upstairs window. I could, and I couldn't. It was long enough to reach the lower window on the back bedroom window, but not the top half.

  It wasn't quite as conclusive as that because one problem is what looks like a locking grip on each section didn't appear to work. There was very little friction to stop all the sections retracting as I tried to use it at full stretch. I will have to make a deeper investigation of that another time, but the preliminary result is that the thing is crap ! I did use it, or try to, one some ground floor windows, and I wasn't impressed with it even then.

  The head section has a mop on one side to do the cleaning, and on the other side is a wiper blade that is not made of rubber, but of a sort of soft plastic. It is totally useless. I thought I might have been fortunate that I had bought a small version of a window cleaner from Poundstretcher. It is only a metre and a bit long, and so only suitable for windows on eye level. The mop seems to be better, and the wiper is possibly rubber, but it seems to hard to give a good wipe. Worse than that is that it is too wide for my window panes, and so I couldn't give it a fair test. It will be easy to reduce the width, and then I'll try it again some time. The whole thing is probably a better length for cleaning the upstairs windows from indoors by dangling it out the window - hopefully.

  After spending some time window cleaning I cooked what was supposed to be lunch, but when I looked at the clock I realised it was going to be a late elevenses. It was a couple of bits of cod in breadcrumbs. It was odd, or annoying that one bit of cod from the pack of two tasted delicious, and the other didn't taste very nice at all.Having eaten my early lunch I could finally sit down and start writing this. One nice thing is that contrary to the weather forecast, we are still getting the occasion sunny spell. Even now, at 2pm, the sun is having another go at wriggling through a crack in the clouds. It almost made it, but didn't quite make it.

  I once had an idea I might go out, maybe just for a train ride or something early this afternoon, but it is early afternoon now, and I am still writing. I don't think I will be doing any great this afternoon, or evening, but I am considering going through all my old photos and negatives again. Some might benefit a rescan after some cleaning, but mainly I want to try and get a better idea of the date of some of the pictures. There are clues, like actual dates written on the folder they come in back from the developers, but many have got mixed up over the years. It could be a tedious job, but it has to be done one day. Whether today will be that day will be revealed when and if it is.