08:05 BST

  Yesterday was so horrible I seemed to have blanked most of it from my mind....well, sort of. I do remember that a fair amount of the day was more mildly dull rather than gloomy, and I am sure it didn't rain at any time. The temperature was around that awkward figure that is neither warm, cold, or mild - maybe I shall describe it as not that cold. It reached about 10° C in the afternoon, and only dropped a couple of degrees in the evening.

  

  I tagged the screenshot of the early morning version of the forecast (the picture above) as "almost like it is winter again", but maybe that should have been reserved for tomorrow, or some of the following days. Today has indeed started at about 7° C, and by mid afternoon it should have climbed to a glorious (sic) 9° C. It may have been raining before 7am, but there seemed to be no rain at 7am. A scattering of hours have a 20% chance of rain until 6 or 7pm when the chance goes up to 50% of higher, and it seems a wet evening is almost a definite. The whole day is going to be slightly gloomy. At the moment it is definitely duller than yesterday's worst. By midnight the temperature will have fallen to a level that can definitely be called cold - just 2° C, and the rain could fall as sleet at 2am. The highest temperature tomorrow could be just 6° C, and there could be a shower or two, but oddly enough, a lot of the day will be less dull than today, and there could even be a couple of sunny spells in the last couple of hours before the suns sets.
 
  I didn't do much yesterday, but I achieved a lot. I finally got around to replacing the "spinning rust" * hard disk in my best laptop with a solid state hard drive. It turned out to be a very simple job. I first used a bootable CD containing the hard disk partitioning tool gparted to copy the partitions of the old hard disk to the new Solid state drive. I  was fitting a bigger drive, and so I also used gparted to increase the size of the home partition to fill the new disk.

  * From this online dictionary "Spinning Rust – term for conventional hard disk drives with motors and using ferrous-based platters for data storage. Probably derogatory now that Flash Drives are beginning to replace conventional drives".

  It took a couple of hours to the new SSD (solid state disk) ready to fit into the laptop, but most of that time was sitting around waiting for the magic to happen. At this point I didn't even know how to get to the old hard disk in the laptop. I initially assumed it would mean taking off the whole base plate of the laptop, but I noticed that almost half of the base was different to the rest, and it turned out it was held in place by one single screw. With that screw removed it just slides out.

  The first thing I noticed was that the old hard disk only used half the screws it should have to hold it in. I assume that the people who refurbished this ex-office laptop were just saving time by being sloppy. I guess it made it easier for me - just four screws instead of six to take out the old hard drive, and put in the new SSD. After putting the base plate back on I then had to use a bootable rescue CD called Rescatux to make the new SSD bootable. Ten minutes later and it booted to Devuan Linux perfectly, and maybe even a bit quicker.

  There was just one thing missing, and that was by design. The laptop was supplied with an installer for Windows 7 on the hard disk, and while taking out the battery, when I was replacing the hard disk, I even noted a Windows 7 licence sticker hidden there. I could have made the laptop dual boot by fist using that installer to install Windows 7, but I shrunk the partition with the installer on it so I could use a substantial part of the old hard disk for Linux. With the new SSD I did away with the Windows installer, and now it just boots straight into Linux.

  I spent more time doing stuff for that laptop and other stuff. One thing was to copy all my medical, and other useful spreadsheets from my main PC to the laptop. There is a very vague reason for copying most of the stuff, although my train photos catalogue spreadsheet copy may have a more immediate use when I meet Kevin for a drink today, Friday, or maybe both days. I also burnt a couple of DVDs for Kevin.

  I didn't really do much more than doing stuff for that laptop yesterday. It actually only took a few hours of my attention. I guess I used up the rest of the day reading - either from my PC screen or from a book. During the day I tried not to eat too much of anything contentious, and even my dinner was fairly safe. It was possible that having not eaten too much earlier in the day, my desire for dinner over rode common sense. I probably didn't need 4 southern fried flavour fish burger patties served on no more than a pile of salad leaves, but I had 4 anyway.

  I continued the new habit of having dinner at 7pm, and watched a bit of TV while I ate. At 7.30pm I turned off the TV, and read until 8.30pm when BBC4 showed an episode of "Yes Prime Minister". That ended at 9pm, and I went straight to bed afterwards. I read for a while, but I was feeling quite sleepy. I doubt it was much after 9.30pm that I had put the book down, turned off the light, and fallen asleep - a fairly deep sleep it would seem.

  I have the very vaguest of memories of waking up around midnight for a pee, but it wasn't until just after 3am that I have a better memory of getting up for another pee, and yet even that memory seems very vague now I try and recall anything more about it. From 3am onwards I seemed to have much lighter sleep, and I can remember dreaming a lot more, although I can't seem to recall those dreams. Every time I try to I think I seem to dredge up memories of dreams from the past. I think last nights dreams must have been very generic or something.

  There was further good new this morning because my blood glucose has dropped again to a much better 7.7mmol/l. That is only just above my self set target of 7.5mmol/l (or better). Sadly it is now too late in the month to get a record low average for the month. In fact it is most likely that if tomorrow could be a really low reading, say 6.5mmol/l, it would still not be low enough to get the average to be better than January's average, but at least it would still be better than any month last year.

  My plans for today feature two unknowns. One unknown is actually a strong probably - I expect I'll be meeting Angela for a lunchtime drink. It has only been very rarely, maybe only once, that she has called it off because of feeling ill since we resumed meeting after Covid restrictions were lifted, and the pubs opened normally. The second unknown is whether or not I will be meeting Kevin after saying goodbye to Angela, and walking back into Catford to the Catford "Spoons" - The London & Rye. It all depends on how Kevin feels, and maybe as to how I feel. I haven't made a completely satisfactory visit to the toilet yet this morning, but there is plenty of time for that. I think the rest of me is fit enough to withstand four pints of Guinness today !