The first very heavy rain fell at about 2am this morning. It wasn't long before it became much lighter rain. There was another heavy downpour about 2 hours later - heavy enough to wake me up again. I'm not sure when I heard the first peel of thunder, but it seemed to be rather distant. I don't think the thunderstorm passed overhead despite the very heavy rain, but it possibly passed closest just before 6am (although it may have been 5am - I was doing my best to sleep, and time was a bit vague). The latest revision to the forecast doesn't change a lot from that shown in the screenshot above. The main change is that from 1pm it should be dry, with white clouds except for a light shower at 2pm. It will be a cool day with the temperature only reaching 21° C. Clear skies tonight will mean a cool start to tomorrow, but also a lot of sunshine for the morning. The second half of the afternoon may feature white clouds, and the temperature may be back to 23° C.

  I started yesterday morning with a few visits to the toilet, and at the time it seemed my food poisoning was still active. That may have been a bit pessimistic, because apart from an odd rumble in my gut during the day, nothing else happened. I still didn't feel inclined to do much, but I did wash my hair, and have a shower in case I went to meet Angela at lunchtime.

  It got to midday, and my stomach still felt a tiny bit sore, and I did have one deep rumble from inside. I didn't want to do it, but I decided better be safe than sorry, and sent a message to Angela saying I would not be going to the pub. Maybe I was a bit biassed towards that because at that point the sun hadn't really broken through the clouds. Perhaps it was to many negatives stacked on each other despite most of them, with hindsight, being imaginary.

  Another hour or so passed, the sun came out, and that made me feel a bit better. I did start imagining going out for a walk in the park, but I was just starting a project I have been meaning to do for some time now. I have a big stack of recordable CDs and DVDs with all sorts of archive data on them. Some date back to 2003 when a complete backup of my entire PC could fit on a couple of recordable DVDs.

  My project, and yesterday I only took a small bite of it, is to go through all those archive/backup disks and copy the most important things onto a pair of big external hard disks.  What makes it slow is that there is a lot of duplication across all those old disks, and in the case of my old photo collections the names have been changed. Back in 2003 I was content to just give a folder of pictures a date, but as the collection grew it seemed a good idea to add some sort of brief description to the folder name.

  I guess I must have got rid of maybe a dozen recordable CDs and DVDs yesterday. Some I just chucked away without copying because they were Linux installation disks, and I have (or can easily download) iso images to burn new disks if I should ever need to. There was some stuff that I had to make difficult decisions as to whether to keep or not. That was mostly old programmes from the days of Windows 95 or 98, and even some from Windows For Workgroups 3.11 !

  I do have some virtual PCs on my main computer, and I do have one that runs Windows 98. That means some of those old programs could be useful for entertainment purposes, but of no practical use. The great difficulty is trying to remember what those programs actually did. They date back to the day when the name of the program had to be squeezed into just 8 letters. Most used a highly abbreviated name which would make sense back in the day when you were searching for something you needed, but with the passing of time it doesn't.

  It may seem that much of those old archive disks contained little of practical value for modern days, but one good thing has emerged, and that was some lost photos. It was a year or more ago that I had a failing hard disk in my main PC, and it was losing files. The most obvious were missing pictures. It is going to be a whole new project to go through the copies I made onto the external hard disks to re-integrate those missing pictures into my main collection.

  Like the day before I was very wary about eating any more lettuce after deciding the source of my e-coli/salmonella/whatever food poisoning was a bag of alleged "washed and ready to eat" lettuce. I did say I was going to examine each bag that I still have to make sure it did say it was ready washed. I didn't really hold back from eating anything else yesterday.

  I started with instant noodles for breakfast, and for lunch I had a rather rich meal. It was 4 Marmite rice cakes spread with cream cheese, and than topped with salami (or was it pepperoni, or another thin sliced spicy sausage ?).  Somehow that seemed to be enough until dinner time. My dinner was a very naughty meal. It was roasted pork belly slices with a small can of "garden peas".

  Those garden peas, although selected to be in plain water, are known to have a moderately high sugar content. The pork belly strips, which were annoyingly lean, shouldn't have had any sugar content. I have come to the conclusion that buying pork belly strips from Aldi is not good. The meat seems rather tough like it was a second rate cut, or as my ad used to say "I bet that one jumped a few fences in it's life". That saying, probably dating back to the war years, may have originally referred to horse meat being substituted for beef, but it seemed to be a family thing for any meat that was tough - even chicken.

  About the only thing to say about last night was that the episode of QI being shown by Dave was a very familiar episode, and after watching it for a while I decided to turn off the TV and go to bed. I read for quite a long time because I am getting near the end of the book I am currently reading. It is not an easy book to read because there are three different threads in it, plus some of it isn't in chronological order.

  The book was written to create an ending, or conclusion to two different story strands. The book is "Fate Of Worlds" by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner, and on the cover it says "The explosive finale to the Ringworld and Fleet Of Worlds series". As I get near the end the different threads start to join together, and so it becomes more interesting. I think it was gone 10pm before I put the book down and tried to sleep.

  Last night I guess it was the usual thing of feeling like sleep would never come, and then suddenly 2 or 3 hours had passed by. In last night's case I did remember a dream from those first few hours of sleep, but all details were forgotten when more memorable things happened. They were all weather related, and I can't remember even real things with any accuracy.

 I am very sure I was woken at 2am by the sound of very heavy rain. I had a pee, and went back to bed. By then the rain had eased off a bit, and I was soon asleep again. I was re-awoken at 4am by another heavy fall of rain. The bit that confuses me is when I first heard a peal of thunder. I think it might have been at 4am, but at that time it was so distant that I didn't even see any flash of lightning.

  The thunderstorm woke me at around 6am. At that time I could see bright flashes around the curtains, but the thunder seemed to take a long time to reach me. I conclude that the thunderstorm didn't pass over me. The rain was still making a fair noise, but it seems I fell asleep for another hour before getting up around 7am. Despite waking up several times in the night, it felt like I had a reasonable sleep.

  In the last 90 minutes I have drunk almost 2 pints of chilled water to re-hydrate myself, and then checked my blood glucose. Maybe a long wait might have helped, but at least there is a small drop from 9.2mmol/l yesterday to 9.1mmol/l this morning.  That is still too high, and I think I will have to dare to start using the lettuce in the fridge again - but maybe I'll give it an extra rinse - just in case.

  One thing I did last night was to send a text to Jodie asking if she thought she would make it over this afternoon for our Thursday beer tasting session. She said she would be. I hope the rain has dried up by the time she needs to get the train - it should have been dry for at least an hour, and maybe two hours, but the weather is rather unpredictable at the moment.
  This is how my garden looked at 7.45 this morning. It is obviously wet, and rain on the camera dome makes some of the image blurry. The last couple of very light falls of rain allowed a few small bits of "lawn" to look a bit greener. This morning's rain could be enough to get it all looking green. If I enjoyed working in the rain I would go out and try and rake more pebbles from the surface, and then prick all the bald areas before adding grass seed to them.

  I don't think I'll be doing any gardening today, but if the rain is light enough, I may pop out to Poundland or Poundstretcher for some bleach and other household stuff - but mostly to stretch my legs. Mostly I will just be relaxing until Jodie appears.

  One quick footnote: I am obviously not very dehydrated at the moment. After my hot bowl of chilli sauce fortified chicken flavour instant noodles I have broken out in a sweat. Curiously it is my arms that seem wettest, although my forehead, usually the first place to sweat is pretty damp. I assume that the rain is making it extra humid at the moment. Either that or I am dying - drowning in my own sweat !