Today's weather is going to be very similar to yesterday - lots of sunshine or sunny spells by 3pm. By 4pm it may be too cloudy for any sunny spells, but they will probably return around 7pm. It was quite a cool morning, and this afternoon the temperature may settle at 25° C from late afternoon. Tomorrow may be a repeat of today, but after tomorrow we go into "Weather Warning" territory with some rather high temperatures predicted. Next Tuesday looks particularly interesting with 37° C predicted !

  I think I can almost classify yesterday as a good and productive day by conveniently forgetting the nice, but disastrous  evening. More about that later.  One of the first things I did was the completion of a job that should have been done weeks or more ago. It was actually back in April last year when I bought my first 4TB (huge !) external USB hard drive. I bought it because it was obvious that my collection of movies and TV programmes was getting to the point of not having enough back up space. That big hard drive solved that problem with lots to spare.

  It was a few weeks back that I came to realise that I had no back up for that hard drive, although I did have all the files scattered on smaller hard drives. I ordered another 4TB external USB3 drive, and made a copy of the first 4TB drive. With a safe backup of all those files I realised there was still plenty of space to also store all my own videos on those big drives too. A day or two ago I moved everything of one of my own video backup drives to one of the big drives, and yesterday I did the same with the second copy of the backup disk.

  I have now liberated two 2TB external hard drives for other use, and one of the best ones will be a backup of my complete home partition of my main work PC. That usually takes hours and hours, almost most of the day, to back up so much data in one go, but it is worth it. I also have a 1TB external drive that has movies on it. I think they are all on the big disks, but I will check before doing anything with that external drive. Another very long job will be to compare the two very big drives to make sure they carry an identical set of files.

  The file copy job I started in the morning, and left it to itself while I did other stuff. One such thing was to deliver a carrier bag of 4 or 5 spare cans of beer to Michael. I was surprised that the front door was opened by his wife Gill. She is in the early stages of dementia, and has severe hearing problems. I was under the impression she never answers the door, but maybe she recognised me through the front windows, and decided that she could answer the door to me.

  My timing was good because I had arrived just as Michael was taking a last wee before the two of them were going out for some shopping. Michael said their shopping included Tesco, and would I like him to pick up some 2l bottles of Diet Coke ? I said "yes please" and asked him to get four bottles for me. I then left, and continued walking towards the pharmacy.

  I had expected my repeat prescription to be bagged and ready to take away over 48 hours after ordering it, but they had to make it up while I waited. I was surprised that there was about 6 girls all crowded behind the counter, and they all seemed to be very busy. I innocently asked if it was because the doctors in the surgery part of the building had finished their two and a half years holiday, and were back at work. I didn't any reply beyond a smirk. Maybe I was fortunate, or maybe giving them 48 hours notice, meant they had everything I wanted in stock, and after maybe a 15 minute wait I had my correctly filled, nothing missing bag of drugs to take home.

  Apart from unloading that bag of drugs, and preparing some lunch, I had nothing to do until Jodie arrived for our afternoon beer tasting session. My lunch was a single, but big (100gm sized) packet of Kimchi flavour instant noodles. Tesco (sometimes) stock two different kimchi flavoured instant noodles. The best one comes in the red packer, but I had the one in the yellow packet (or have I got the colours confused ?). The packet I had yesterday was not as good as the the other one, although still quite nice. It wasn't ideal when I was trying to control my blood glucose, and I might have fasted until dinner time, but I didn't want to drink on an empty stomach.

  Michael turned up with my Diet Cokes before Jodie arrived. He said he wanted to try and join us for an hour or two if his wife seemed stable enough. About half an hour after Jodie arrived there was a ring at the doorbell, and Michael joined us for longer than he intended.  Jodie brought a couple of rotten beers. They were typical (for her) very sour, very murky looking, fruit flavoured beers. One of them was so awful I poured the rest of my glass into Jodie's glass after just one mouthful !

  To make things worse, the two beers she brought along were originally draft beers, and she had poured them into old water bottles. They looked like very unhealthy samples for the doctor ! Fortunately I had some nice beers. They were some I had bought over a month ago to pad out another order. They came from/were brewed by Two Chefs Brewery. If I recall correctly, it is a sort of collective brewery in Holland. I was most happy that they hadn't tried to do anything too exotic, and all the beers we tried seemed to be very nice according to all three of us !

  Jodie was doing her usual trick of drinking very slowly in between checking Twitter and Instagram, plus checking the website she logs all her beer drinking on - untappd.com. I ended up filling in the spaces with other beers. The net result was that I was a bit drunk at the end of the session, but only a bit.... Unfortunately only a bit was still enough to break my eating plans, and to order a takeaway. I could have ordered something fairly safe, like shish kebab, but I had a strong yearning for curry for some unknown reason.

  I have to admit that I really enjoyed the Indian stuff I had last night, and I had deliberately ordered enough for another big meal, or maybe two if I were in the right mood. Of course there were consequences of eating that food, and it wasn't just the stench of curry flavour farts ! By the time I had eaten it was almost time to watch an episode of QI on TV. I watched the first few minutes before turning it off because I didn't like on of the panellists.

  It was a lot cooler last night, and I didn't need the fan on to get to sleep, and to stay asleep. I'm not sure how I am doing it recently, but it often seems that my first 2 or 3 hours of sleep are so dreamless, that I have no idea of any passing time. It is almost like being anaesthetised - one minute the clock was saying 11pm (or something like that) and the next minute it is showing 2am ! I woke again, or was woken up again at 3am. The first thing I was aware of was the sound like a big hammer striking a chisel to try and cut through a padlock or something. I had a few ringing blow followed by some softer blow. I think it is more likely it was some night time maintenance on the nearby railway line, but it could have been something nefarious going on. I heard no sirens, or saw no blue lights, so I guess it was something legitimate.

  I definitely dreamed in the later hours of the night. One dream featured being in a big posh house that also had a sort of zoo in it. Most of the animals were generally safe, but then the police arrived with two big lions, and left them there.  It meant free access to anywhere in the house had to be stopped, and it felt very threatening to be there. I don't think it could be called a nightmare because nothing happened, but there was just an awareness of possible danger.

  I nearly got up early this morning. Somewhere between 6 and 6.30am it was feeling slightly cool in my bedroom, and possibly too cool for sleep, but after a pee I went back to bed, and suddenly another hour had passed by. One thing I didn't do was to check my blood glucose straight away. I waited until I had drunk a half litre bottle of chilled water. I may have checked a bit too early after drinking that water because my blood glucose was rather high, but thankfully the right side of the red line. 9.8mmol/l is still far too high, but I guess it was what I was expecting after that takeaway Indian dinner I had last night.

  There is no good reason why I shouldn't be fasting this morning, and maybe until dinner time, but I've had some breakfast. It was partly because I was feeling really hungry, and partly because I am unsure exactly what I am doing today. My breakfast was actually what I had originally planned to be a side dish to last night's dinner. It was a Tesco ready made side salad fortified with some beans. The beans started life as a can of Pinto beans. I emptied the can into a sieve, and washed the beans under running water. I them partly dried them on some kitchen paper. I put them in a sealable container then poured on some balsamic salad dressing, and sprinkled on some dried thyme and dried mint. The final touch was a light sprinkle of black pepper. After being left in the fridge until this morning they seemed very nice when added to the side salad.

  I do have a definite plan to start things off today. Carrie and Steven, aka Caz And Steve Duo, are busking in Bromley between midday and 2pm. I was intending to get there by midday, but time seems to be slipping past very fast this morning. Maybe I'll aim for 1pm. Like when I saw them at London Bridge, I don't intend to stay there for much more than half an hour. It is what I do after that that is the mystery. From London Bridge station I was in an ideal place to go off and visit a few stations as part of my Freedom Pass Quest to visit the extremes of it's validity. Bromley offers no such opportunities, but I could so some rail photography from Bromley South station, or even further afield.