There was a lovely blue sky earlier this morning, but now some clouds have appeared. The latest revision to the forecast now shows sunny spells all morning, and continuing to 2pm. 6pm may also feature sunny spells. The rest of the day will probably be cloudy, but maybe not gloomy. The afternoon temperature is expected to be 21° C. Tomorrow may be very similar to today, although the BBC reckon there will be sunny spells all day long.

   I had a reasonably productive day yesterday, but I didn't do things like gardening, which would have been a good thing to do. I was going to say "in the morning", but it was more like almost lunchtime when I did a fair load of laundry. I seem to have acquired a fair backlog of laundry, and I will probably do the other half today. It was gone 1pm when I went out to get some shopping in Tesco.

  On that shopping trip I needed both bottles of Diet Coke, but food as well. I had almost run out of both. As I mentioned yesterday morning, I fancied something meaty, and I did indeed buy burgers and bacon, but nothing more exotic except for a Tesco "Finest" ready meal of beef ragu, found on the reduced price shelf (at least I think that it was beef ragu, but I am not going to dive into the rubbish bin to re-check the label.

  I did buy a couple of other "luxuries". One was a pot of egg and mayonnaise sandwich filler. It seemed to suggest it was a low sugar product, but my one failing is to read the small print to see if the nutritional content is measured against a standardised 100mg, or something silly such as per spoonful. I needed something to scoop it up, and bought a 5 pack of plain "Kettle Chips" (at a special Clubcard price).

  It was that sandwich filler, and two small (25gm ?) bags of plain "Kettle Chips", otherwise knows as crisps in this side of the Atlantic, that was the main part of my lunch. It was not the healthiest of meals !! I'm not sure if I even really enjoyed it beyond thinking it was "nice" - which is a sort of bland description. Later on I would have three Marmite Rice cakes with cheese on - maybe I was still hungry, or maybe I was a bit bored.

  One task I did in the afternoon, and it was boring during some long waits for things to happen, was to retrieve some lost videos from a memory stick.  The memory stick was owned by Jodie's friend Alan, and he offered it to her so she could move 25 videos from her phone to it to make more room on her phone for more photographs (she perpetually runs er phone almost bursting at the seams, and panics when she can't take more photos).

  To cut a long story short, and because I can't give a full technical description of what happened, it seems Jodie pulled the memory stick out of her phone too early. Every time you write files to a memory device an entry is added to an index that records where in that memory device the files are saved. If she disconnected the memory stick before that index was update there would be no record of the files.

  After spending quite a bit of time rummaging around in the memory stick I decided to treat the wanted files as the equivalent of being deleted. I used the Linux Testdisk application, that includes Photorec (photo recovery), to search for deleted files, or I did eventually. Initially I searched for all files, deleted or still shown. The memory stick had hundreds, maybe thousands of mp3 music files on it, and the search just choked on them all. I then asked the search program to ignore mp3 files, and 20 minutes later it found Jodie's video files.

  The only problem is that without the file name being stored in the index, the search program can only name them as a numeric file number. All the interesting stuff in the file name, as used by probably all mobile phone cameras, the time and date, is lost. Curiously enough maybe 5 videos were of nothing more than Alan snoring. Jodie said she wanted to confront him with those snores, but there is nothing Alan can do to change them.

  I didn't really do anything else yesterday unless you include washing up a few items in the sink, or yet a couple more tasks that involve nothing but sitting in front of my PC. One such task was to integrate half a dozen albums by The Pretty Things into my main music collection. It seems it was a couple of years ago when I downloaded those albums in flac (a higher quality file type than mp3) format. For continuity I converted them to high bit rate mp3 files.

  One other PC based job was a bit tedious. I checked every photo I took in 2020, and out of as many as a couple of thousand photos I found just two pictures of trains to add to my mega spreadsheet of train photos. Only one of those two photos was of a class 465 "Networker" train - almost the standard type of train around these parts until recently. I wonder if I will ever get a photo of every single class 465 train before they are withdrawn. I might have to go through every single photo taken in 2021, but I think I had started the spreadsheet by then, and I would probably already included any. It might still be worth checking though.

  My dinner was the Tesco "Finest" beef ragu (or whatever it was called). It had a really fancy description which included boasts about selecting the finest cuts of beef for it. I guess that might be true, but there was so little beef in it that it was hard to tell. For lovers of pasta it was probably good, but I thought it was rubbish. I am not a great lover of pasta, and considering it was about 60% pasta, 3% beef, and the rest being a sort of thing beefy gravy, I found it very disappointing.

  So disappointing that half an hour later I had a dinner part 2. That was supposed flame grilled chicken chunks on a heap of lettuce with a generous helping of mayonnaise. A very simple dish, but more enjoyable that that Tesco ready meal ! I was supposed to be very careful about what I ate yesterday because I started the day with a high blood glucose reading. That didn't stop me having a bowl of instant noodles for breakfast yesterday, and it probably should have done so.

  The description of QI in the programme listings didn't inspire me to watch any TV last night. Although I suppose watching a recording on two more Sherlock Holmes episodes would be equivalent to watching them as repeats. I expect I have mentioned before, several times, that I really love these Granada adaptations of the original stories. Having read the original books I find them very authentic. Occasionally, and one episode last night included a good example, I find some of the costumes of the female actors to be very lovely, and almost erotic in an odd way.

  I am happy to say that I got another enjoyable night's sleep, and my only complaint is waking up too early this morning. I seemed to have no trouble getting to sleep, or back to sleep after the few times I woke in the night. I am aware I had loads of assorted dreams, but only a single fact from one dream stays in my memory.  It was the bald statement that in some very windy parts of the world the inhabitants would cover their houses in oatmeal. The theory was that the rough surface would break up the wind, and help it pass by more easily. There is a real world equivalent to this. I am sure I read somewhere that sharks have a rough skin so they can move through the water faster, and some aeroplanes have flutes on the wings to modify the air flow for more economical flight.

  I was a bit worried about my blood glucose reading this morning. I had started yesterday with a very high reading, and yet I still ate a fair amount yesterday. Some of what I ate I would not expect to be good for me. It came as a bit of a surprise to find my blood glucose this morning was less than my general average at just 8.1mmol/l. That was very satisfying.

  I have only a few plans to start today, but I have no idea what I will be doing for the rest of the day. Soon after finishing this writing I shall have a shower, and wash my hair. I might possibly have a shave too. Once I have finished with the bath tub I shall get the big buckets out and wash 4 or 5 t-shirts. Once they are hanging on the line I will be free to decide on a course of action...or not. I probably should go for a long walk, but it is possible I may go station and train spotting.