This morning felt particularly fresh with the temperature as low as 15° C, and today it will only rise to 22° C. As I write this the sky is very clear, and we are getting a very long sunny spells - I would call it sunny ! The latest revision to the forecast has a few extra sunny spells compared to the earlier revision seen in the screenshot above. The distribution of them seems a bit random, and I feel sure the forecast is only approximating reality. It is entirely possible that today may feel sunnier than the forecast predicts. On the other hand it might go the other way and one of the clouds might rain on us. Tomorrow may feature clear skies, and non stop sunshine, but it may only be 23° C.

   Yesterday my day was planned around an afternoon beer tasting session with Jodie, but that didn't happen. It is probable the she warned me she would not be coming here yesterday the last time I saw her, a week ago. It was possible it was when I had drunk enough beer to blur my memory. I was still expecting her until almost 4.30pm - that being about the latest she would arrive if there were trouble on the trains for instance.

  Of course when I say my day was planned that is a bit of an exaggeration. I had a few loose ideas of what I might do. One such idea was to do a bit of laundry, but with the prospect of a dull afternoon, and maybe some far sunnier, and warmer days coming up, I put the laundry off for a few days. I ended up having a fairly lazy day dotted with a few medium not lazy moments.

  One such non lazy moments was a shopping trip to Poundland. I was after one specific thing, and they didn't have any. That specific thing was ear plugs in the DIY section. That didn't stop me half filling my rucksack with all sorts of other things ranging from a ball of string to a packet of ginger biscuits. It also included a bag of salted mixed nuts. The bag seemed much smaller than they used to be, and instead of trying to make it last more then a single day, I scoffed the whole lot in a couple of hours.
  One unexpected arrival yesterday was my new camera back pack. I was expecting it today, but getting it early allowed me to experiment with the best way of fitting everything in. When I showed this picture to some people they said I had done it all wrong. I must admit it is not packed right, but there is one feature of this back pack they didn't know about. It is not a feature I will be needing at Petts Wood Calling tomorrow, but maybe it could have it's uses one day. It is a hatch you can unzip on the side that allows one camera, all set up, and ready to use, to be taken out without having to open the whole thing up.

  The camera with the big lens on it on the right of the case is where that hatch is, and that dictates some of the layout. By taking the lens off the second camera I could rearrange the rest of the space to be a little tighter packed, and maybe find room for a flashgun. I still would not have room for the two bottles of chilled water I want to take along tomorrow, plus a small supply of ginger biscuits to give me a small boost if I feel I am flagging, plus a couple of cans of ready mixed vodka and diet coke that I am going to smuggle in to surprise Angela !

  I thought I ate sort of sensibly yesterday. I started the day with a bowl of instant noodles. For a slightly late lunch with the idea of lining my stomach for what I assumed to be an imminent attack of pints of beers, I had some grilled bacon - and it was very nice. My dinner was another three burger patties from the same pack of 6 that fuelled dinner the previous evening, and once again served on a deep bed of lettuce. I was a bit more sparing with the dressing on the lettuce last night.

  Those burger patties were interesting in maybe a morbid way. They were part of the cheap-ish "Firepit" Tesco brand. They are sort of nice, but their texture hints strongly of poor quality meat given an extra grinding, and then additional tasted added. I have suspicions that one such ingredient may be sugar, but I can't check that now. The biggest clue would be if the nutritional figure was made to look low by specifying it per quarter burger or some other outrageous figure to hide the real value. The naughtiest of such practices are when something that barely feeds one person, but says two helpings, quotes the sugar content for a quarter of the pack. That is really irritating !

  With no beer yesterday afternoon I decided to drink vodka and Diet Coke while I amused myself in the evening watching three, feature length, Sherlock Holmes stories. Usually I would probably drink whisky, but for some reason my eyes alighted on a bottle of vodka that had been gathering dust for a long time. The odd thing is that I didn't feel drunk at all, and yet I obviously was.

  One effect of the vodka, as well as the hot pepper sauce on my dinner several hours earlier, was that I felt quite hot when I went to bed - hot enough to leave the window open, but not quite hot enough to need the fan on me. That would turn out to be one ingredient in a poor night's sleep. Despite feeling tired I needed to read for a while to get in the right mood for sleep. It is possible it was midnight before I fell asleep, but it could have been closer to 11pm.

  It was 1.30am when I woke up feeling cold. I had two choices - either pull the empty duvet cover over me, or close the window. I chose to close the window because I knew it would get colder still outside. Of course once I had closed the window the cold draught went away, and as expected, trying to sleep under the empty duvet cover felt too warm. I may have been awake for over half an hour reaching some sort of equilibrium between too hot and too cold. My bedroom temperature was still about 25° C after closing the window. I don't know if it was actually half an hour, but it certainly felt like ages before I fell asleep.

  Of course I only knew I had fallen asleep once I woke up again, and I woke several more times in the night. On each occasion I felt too uncomfortable to get back to sleep. One additional discomfort was the fact that it felt like my guts were in turmoil. Ideally I would have gone to the toilet, and I did have one brief try, but only farted. In one respect the discomfort was minimal, and the worst aspect was the noises my gut was making. Such noises are amplified a lot in the dark of night.

  I managed to have a sort of lie in for an hour this morning, and it was in the region of 7.30am when I got up. I only got up because I was convinced I needed to finally go for a poo, but once again it was all piss and wind ! One of the first things I did after the toilet was to go down to the kitchen to get a pint and a bit of chilled water to attempt to rehydrate myself. I didn't give myself long to let that water percolate through my system, before going to the bathroom to scrub my hands prior to getting a pin prick of blood for my blood glucose meter.

  While in the bathroom, but before I washed my hands, I tried sitting on the toilet again, and this time I was successful - very successful. I seem to recall that I didn't "do" much yesterday morning. I definitely did this morning ! No wonder I was in discomfort during the night. After coming back to my bedroom, and checking my blood glucose I git a reading better than yesterday, but still a lot higher than desired. Yesterday morning it was 9.7mmol/l, very close to the red line, but this morning it was a slightly more reasonable 9.2mmol/l.

  I wonder if I had waited a bit longer for that chilled water to rehydrate me I might have got an even lower reading. As I mentioned yesterday, I am a little suspicious of the batch of test strips I have been using. Maybe there is another clue that the readings I have been getting lately are not true readings. In the past, whenever I have had a run of high readings I would actually get a physical effect of the high blood glucose. It would be a usually minor version of what originally got me diagnosed as a type 2 diabetic.

  It must have been in the late 1990s when after a series of boils on my inner thigh erupted as a very painful carbuncle that needed medical attention. Since controlling my blood glucose levels I haven't had anything so drastic as that, but at times when I have let things slip my first reminder is a small, but still sensitive and messy boil on one or other inner thigh. All through this seeming long series of high readings I haven't had a single problem in that respect. I am sure that hints that my underlying blood glucose level, as in the type measured by a proper laboratory lab test, is not as bad as I fear.

  It is also interesting that all my attempts to keep my reading down all involve eating less or more healthy stuff. It is a bit like very low key dieting. Yesterday morning, after my shower, and also after eating breakfast, plus drinking a couple of pints of chilled water, I weighed myself. It is no more than wishful thinking to assume all that adds up to an added 1kg of weight, but if it were true then I would have lost just a little weight recently. Maybe even a tiny bit more if I take into account the idea that I didn't fully empty my bowels yesterday morning. If nothing else, my trouser belt does seem to feel a bit slacker when I considered it just now.

  My plans for today involve a lot of resting to prepare myself for an arduous day tomorrow. There are two, and possibly three things I may do today. A visit to Tesco would be useful, although not essential. I think I will spend a little bit of time exploring new layouts of the stuff in my new camera back pack. I might even do a bit of laundry. If I can I want to try and eat sensibly so I am nice and comfortable tomorrow. I don't fancy waking up to the stomach ache I have only resolved by 2 visits to the toilet so far this morning, and I am wondering if there might be a third before the day is over.