Yesterday's low daytime temperature gave a very cool night, and I think 12° C could easily be called a cold morning. There is a choice of weather today. The cheery version is the BBC's weather forecast - sunny spells and even occasional full sunshine through the day. The Met Office is far more pessimistic as can be seen in the screenshot above. There has been one revision to the forecast since I took the screenshot, but nothing has changed except the starting time (now 8am instead of 7am). It is looking like we are heading far deeper into autumn with the highest daytime temperature of a very cool 16° C. Tomorrow morning may start at just 9° C, but a possible day of full sunshine should raise it to 16° C again.
 
  I don't have a lot to show for it, but yesterday felt mostly like a good day. During the morning I conducted a careful study in being alert while not doing much. I was waiting for a delivery of 15 or 16 bottles and cans of beer. Just before I finished writing yesterday, I knew it was expected to arrive between 12:56 and 13:56, but it was lucky I stayed alert because it arrived at 12:17 BST.

  It didn't take long to discover I had made a mistake in the order. I had ordered two cans of the same beer. I think that was because it appeared on the front page of Beer Merchants web site as a "new" beer, and also on another page together with beers that weren't "new". It was no bother having two cans, and yesterday it was an advantage.

  One other delivery that was made almost at the same time was a 2.5 inch hard disk caddy that I had ordered from Amazon. It had been sent via Royal Mail, and arrived both far sooner than Amazon estimated, and before the other two items I had ordered had even been despatched by Amazon. That one item; although ordered via Amazon, actually came from a third party shop or supplier.

  Some time in the unknown future I will be meeting friend Kevin, almost certainly in a pub, and he wants to show me a 2.5inch hard disk that came from a scrapped set top TV box. There should be some TV programmes recorded on the hard disk that he would ideally like to keep, but his Windows PC can't see anything on the hard disk. He wonders if a Linux PC might see anything. It is possible, although whether it can make any sense of the file structure is dubious. I very much doubt the programmes are saved as, for instance, mp4 files. They may just be indexed areas of data on the hard disk. I am unsure if this hard disk is an IDE or SATA connected disk, and so I have ordered caddies for both. They will be useful to have for other reasons.

  I think I mentioned yesterday morning that Michael said he could get 4 bottles of Diet Coke for me while he was shopping in Tesco (and had gone there in his car). It was just after 2pm when he dropped them around. I asked if he fancied dropping in for a beer and a chat, and initially he said he would see what demands his wife made on him, and said he would get back to me in half an hour or so.

  It was about half an hour later when he sent me a text to say he was on his way. He arrived with a snack and a big bottle of Heineken.  We actually started on a can of Budmo lager each - the lager sold in Aldi where all the profits go to help Ukraine brewers during the war out there. I have to say it was considerably nicer than Heineken ! We also drank the duplicate can from my beer order. To my surprise Michael seemed to like it. It was a slightly sour pale with hints of tropical fruit in it. It is more the sort of thing that Jodie usually likes. We'll open the other can on Sunday when she should be over for another beer tasting session.

  Michael talked almost non stop about music, which I must admit was starting to become slightly boring, but only slightly. However it was still quite nice when he left so I could start the next step in preparing my dinner. I wouldn't be eating it for another 90 minutes or more, but it was a sort of stewed beef with "purple sprouting broccoli" and a few light dosings of herbs and spices. It was nice - ish !

  I watched a bit of TV last night, and ended by watching a Stephen Fry episode of QI. That finished at 10pm, and I went straight to be afterwards. I had contemplated going to bed even earlier than that in preparation of my visit to the nurse today, but that is not until 11:40am, and there is no real need to rush this morning. Maybe it was the white pepper in my dinner, or maybe something else, but I felt very hot when I tried to sleep. I fell asleep uncovered, and by 1am (or 2am - I lost track of the time) I woke up feeling rather cool !

  It seems unlikely I had slept non stop to 2am, and so it was more likely to be 1am, or even earlier when I woke up. I wasn't just cold, but also uncomfortable in several other ways too. My cold chest was aching, and that was made worse by trying to get back to sleep laying on my right side. Even when I turned back to my left side I could feel my ribs go crunch, and my chest was aching almost enough to be a heart attack - except experience told me it wasn't - I hoped !

  Less obvious, except from the gloops and gurgles coming from my stomach, was a growing stomach upset. It was not as bad as the one I had about three weeks ago. That one was very "violent". This morning it was more sedate, but still not messing around, and I stayed awake until almost 4am before I felt confident it was all over, or at least safe to go back to bed. I laid down, and it seemed that nothing would happen, but suddenly a couple of hours had passed, and it was time to get up.

  My guts are still not clear, and I have had to go to the toilet, fortunately with no urgency, twice more so far this morning. Before I had breakfast of instant noodles I did two things, and the results were contradictory. I weighed myself, and I was disappointed by the reading. A few days ago it seemed like I was losing a bit of weight, but since then I seemed to have put it back on. I am still within 500gm of the weight I will tell the nurse I am, although I bet she won't accept my word, and will put me on the scales. However, in the past she has been generous in allowing for the weight of my clothing and stuff, and has actually entered what I said into my clinical record.

  The great contradiction to this small weight gain is that once again, for the third day running, my blood glucose reading has been exceptionally good. This morning it was 7.3mmol/l, and that suggests I have been very careful about what I have been eating, but it seems it is counterintuitive to assume that less sugar equates to less calories - which is a great shame. Tomorrow I expect my blood glucose to be a lot higher because I am tempted to order some sort of feast to celebrate getting the nurse off my back for another year - possibly.

  I now have a couple of hours to wash my hair and have a shower. Fit a new black ink cartridge into my printer, and print out my latest blood pressure and blood glucose readings for the nurses entertainment. That is probably all I have to do, apart from getting dressed for the outside world, before taking a wander along to the surgery. I wonder how long I should allow to get past their high security door that keeps sick people out of their nice clean surgery ?