Apart from a few spells of hazy sunshine this morning, today is probably going to be a slightly better version of yesterday. Today the forecast says the sunny spells may start earlier at 3pm, and maybe the clouds will clear enough to give full sunshine by 5pm. The highest temperature this afternoon should be 26° C. It's funny that after those couple of days we had earlier, where the temperature reached 38° C, 26° C doesn't seem much at all.

   I'm not sure why I was looking forward to a good rest yesterday. After 2 days of Chattfest I was feeling it, although maybe not as much as I could have done if I had stayed for the full set of bands on both days. That would probably have knocked me out. Anyway, yesterday was actually a busy day, and far from a day or rest.

  The thing that took the most time was going through all the photos I took, and selecting the best ones to edit for photo albums of each band. A count up reveals I took 309 pictures on the Sunday. Not all of them were of the bands, and a lot of them were where I held the shutter button down to take 5 or 6 shots in very rapid succession. That is my secret sauce to get pictures where the subject has just the right expression on their face, or sometimes just to catch the drummer with his sticks frozen at a good angle.

  If I had the patience or stamina, or whatever it takes, I could have whizzed through all those pictures in a couple of hours, but I chose to spread it all out, and did quite a few leisurely paced hours at a time. I also fitted in time to get some laundry done. I did that in the early afternoon because the sun wasn't expected to come out until much later in the afternoon. I was able to bring it the three t-shirts, 2 pairs of underpants, and 2 face flannels, dry and warm at about 7pm.

  Apart from stopping for instant noodles for breakfast, a can of Irish stew for lunch, and a chicken salad for dinner, almost my whole day is accounted for. In between photo editing I read several pages at a time, and in the evening I watched a bit of TV.  I was in bed by 10pm, but it was probably 10pm before I managed to get to sleep. I seemed to sleep quite well, or at least better than some recent nights.

  There was just one time when I heard an odd noise that I wanted to blame on the mouse, but I think it was actually some sort of gurgle from inside my belly. I have seen of heard nothing from the mouse assumed to be in my bedroom for several days now. I won't 100% believe it has died until, and if I see the corpse, but that is my working hypothesis. It has certainly had nothing to eat in my bedroom since I gave the carpet a really good hoovering under my computer desk. Of course it is possible that it left my bedroom, and maybe even found it's way to the kitchen, but I do my best not to drop crumbs in there, and keep all food covered.

  I think I could describe my dreams as pleasant, and maybe even humorous. The only trouble is that I am finding it hard to remember enough to describe them in any meaningful way. One dream was about being in a car with two friends, and we were driving around loads of news agents and news stalls looking for any porn magazines they might still stock. I don't know why we should do that when porn is so freely available on the internet, and I don't think the dream was set in the past.

  Another dream was about telephone exchanges. I had gone to work in a telephone exchange in Sydenham. I think it was after I had retired, and so while it was useful to earn a bit more money, I was not worried about working hard - or at all. On the other hand I can remember telling someone that with a travel allowance, and London weighting, it was a very useful amount of money. The important thing is that it wasn't worth more than my happiness, and so I wouldn't put up with any stick from managers.

   Fortunately the whole ethos at this telephone exchange (actually one I never visited during my 21 years of working in exchanges) was one of relaxation any time it was possible. A few exchanges that I worked in had that ethos. If everything was maintained well it would last for ages with little attention, and provided you jumped on any failure very quickly, much of the time was your own. Of course management didn't really know this - except for one or two rare managers who shared the basic idea.

  One such manager would come in early, and work like stink for a few hours. He would tell us that if we didn't see him with his feet up, reading the paper, by 11am something serious was happening. In the dream exchange they had their own saying - "don't forget all of Tuesday is teatime". In other words, get all the essentials done on Monday, and then have a day of rest - provided no fault alarms were raised, and then it was all hands to the pumps.

  I think I've said enough about my dreams, and so on to this morning. This morning my blood glucose is slightly down to 8.7mmol/l (8.9mmol/l yesterday morning). It leaves very little room for complacency, but is otherwise satisfactory. I'm not really sure how I feel this morning, except for feeling mildly constipated. All the usual joints hurt just a little bit, and my head feels sort of foggy (I can imagine my writing contains all sorts of errors despite trying to correct any I see). Probably the most significant thing is that the very grey light outside is sucking any inspiration out of me.

  I have to go to Tesco this morning, but I can't seem to raise the enthusiasm for much else at the moment. If it brightens up while I am shopping in Tesco, I might consider going out somewhere once I have cooled off. Despite the murky look outside it is already between 26 and 27°  and it almost feels like it could be brewing up a storm, yet no forecaster predicts one. Both the BBC and Met Office seem to agree it should start getting lighter soon, and that the sun will appear mid afternoon. Maybe I might go for a train ride, or a walk in the park, but past experience says that once the morning has pissed me off it is hard to recover from it.