10:22 BST

  Yesterday was rather disappointing. The morning sunshine may have finished later than forecast, but the last hour or two was rather sparse. In the middle of the afternoon there was some very light rain that didn't last for long. I guess that was almost as forecast. There were times later in the afternoon/early evening when the sky was filled with dark, very threatening looking clouds. It looked as if there could have been a heavy downpour, but in fact it stayed dry. It was a very cool day with the temperature only rising to 14° C.

  

  There was bright sunshine at 7am, but then the clouds took over, and the rest of today looks like it is going to be a re-run of yesterday.  There latest revision to the forecast says there is a 40% chance of light rain at 3 and 4pm, but the rest of the day may be dry, and with only a 40% chance of rain, it is quite possible that 3 and 4pm will be dry as well. The latest revision even shows the afternoon temperature to be the same as yesterday, just 14° C. Tomorrow may reach 15° C, but there seems to be a 30 to 40% chance of rain from midday onwards. Before that it will be like today - a brief sunny start, and then rather dull.

   The highlight of yesterday was the beer tasting session, and the lowlight was reaching a very difficult impasse trying to get the old Toshiba laptop, which I wrote about yesterday, and probably the day before that, working well. After having a shower, the first thing I did yesterday was to go shopping in Tesco. As I suggested yesterday morning, I wanted bird feed as much as I wanted me food.

  I actually bought very little food of immediate use to me. After filling my basket with four cans of soup, tow big bags of bird seed, and a small bag of mealworms, there was not a lot of room to buy anything for me. I did buy two packs of reduced price flame grilled chicken chunks, a bag of mixed lettuce leaves, and finally a 6 pack of crisps. The latter were a bit naughty, but one the other hand, there is empirical evidence that they are OK in small quantities.

  I still had 3 or 4 hours to kill before Jodie came over for our beer tasting session, and so I took another look at the old Toshiba laptop. My previous days work had it in a usable condition,  but not of the update mechanisms worked because it couldn't find the software repositories. After a fair bit of piddling around I came to the conclusion I had accidently installed a 8 year old version of the AntiX Linux operating system. I tried to manually update the addresses of the software repositories, but I messed that up, and made it worse.

  The simplest option was to install the latest version over the old version, and I did just that, but there was a catch. The full version of the installer is too big for a CD, and that laptop only has a CD drive. I could use an external DVD drive, but there is no option to boot from a USB device. I had used up most of my time at that point. A fair portion of the time was taken up with downloading several versions of the installer files, and burning them to CD.

  The versions that fitted on a CD did not have a live desktop, and only booted to a command line. In turn they only installed a basic command line operating system. Installing a graphical desktop had to be done the hard way. Unfortunately I found the AntiX web site to be not very helpful. I had another go after Jodie had left, and when I was just a leeeetle bit drunk !

  The beer tasting session had a few good points. Many of the beers in the delivery that arrived on Saturday were unknown to Jodie, and therefore exciting ! I think we only open one can of the new stuff. Mostly we drank some beers that had been in the fridge a week or three. The bad thing is that Jodie spent too much time glued to her phone. Another good thing is that she was picked up by Alan, and he had driven over. That meant he could take away the pile of boxes I have been saving for Jodie. She is using them to pack up stuff from her parents house - which is hers now.

  After Jodie left I had my dinner. It was rather meat heavy, and that meat didn't really go with a pile of salad...actually, on second thoughts I am sure I intended to eat the beef burgers on a heap of lettuce, but for some reason, possibly something to do with booze, I couldn't be bothered with the lettuce. Ideally I would have watched a bit of TV last night, and then gone to bed. There was some good music stuff on Sky Arts, and I did watch some of it, but I got distracted by that Toshiba laptop.

  I was anxious to try an experiment. I had a copy of Super Grub 2 on CD that I could boot. It usually has the facility to find an externally, USB connected CD/DVD drive, but I think the hardware on that old laptop is just a bit too old. I have a suspicion probably has a USB 1.0 port, and USB didn't really work properly until about USB 1.5. It did seem to find the external DVD drive because the drive gave a little kick, but then it seemed to crash.

  I returned to the TV to find I had missed all the best stuff, but a documentary about the making of Peter Gabriel's "So" album was partly interesting. I think that finished at about 10.30pm, and I then went straight to bed. I was probably asleep, under the duvet, with no heating on, by 11pm. I did seem to get some good sleep, but it was interrupted a few times in the early hours of this morning by cramps in my legs.

  I can't put my hand on my heart and swear I've got all the details in the right order, but if I do remember correctly I had two potentially interesting dreams ended early by painful cramp. In one dream I was walking across a park when I saw a young woman. She strongly reminded me of someone I know of in real life, but hair blond hair was hidden under a headscarf, and she had sunglasses on. I concluded it wasn't her, and walked past her. I did part acknowledge her with a smile, and then she said "hello Bill". It was her after all, but before the dream could continue I was woke by the calf muscles in my right leg cramping, and I had to leap out of bed.

  I think that was at about 4am, and it was getting light. It was also getting cold. It seemed like a good time to turn the heater on (just on low). After a pee I went back to bed, and got back to sleep. I then dreamed of the same woman, but this time she was laying face down with a sheet over the lower half of her body. I could see some strange movement and asked what it was. She said she was tapping her bum cheeks to break up fat. Like a pervert, I asked if I could have a go, and she said yes. About two taps in, softer than a slap, but sort of similar, and feeling rather nice, the cursed cramps started again, and once again I had to leap out of bed to put some weight on my legs to stop the agony of the cramping.

  I finally got up at just after 7am, and it felt like most of my sleep was pretty fair. I checked my blood glucose, and found I didn't have to worry about what I had eaten or drank yesterday. The reading was a rather excellent 7.6mmol/l. If only I could have had a few more readings like that during the months I would be looking at a record low for the end of month average. Unfortunately it looks like this month is going to have a very average, average.

  I have already done two things today. I have had a shower, and I have been shopping in Aldi for the first time in weeks - possibly 5 or 6 weeks. I ended up buying rather a lot, and if I could have carried it home,, I could have bought a lot more. If I had a bottomless credit card I could have bought even more than that -  I was rather interested in a cordless chainsaw. It would possibly be powerful enough to cut up the last logs in my garden. I think all I can do in reality is dream about it.

  After a very late start writing this, it is now almost midday. One interesting thing is that despte what I saw in the last weather forecast revision, there has been quite a few sunny spells this morning. It is quite cloudy, as per the forecast, but there seems to be gaps in the cloud big enough to let through some occasional sunshine. The latest revision shows no sunshine at all, but there is now a 50% chance of light rain at 1pm. They are making it up as the go along !

  I have no idea what I will do for the rest of the day, but I guess I will be playing with that old Toshiba laptop for some of the time. I might even be bold and open it right up to see if it is possible change the CD drive to a DVD drive. That would make things so simple. I might even convince myself to try it. On the other hand, having just seen the latest guess at tomorrows weather, which looks foul, and might include a thunderstorm, it might be prudent to go out today if I am ever going to go out at any time. I don't really feel inclined to go out though.