One other interesting thing the video shows is the pleasure steamer Balmoral. It is a Scottish based ship that has been preserved as a tourist boat. It seems to have plenty of passengers/tourists aboard as it makes it's way up the Thames towards central London. At the current time the boat is out of use while maintenance is carried out on it, and donations sought for the work. More here - https://www.thebalmoral.org.uk/  (click on News for current information about the work going on).

  One job that occupied me for a lot of the afternoon was to transfer a few more Hi8 video tapes, via a digitiser, to my PC. I used a bit of that time to confirm that all the Sony Branded tapes, which represent at least 75% of my collection, are in very poor condition. I did manage to get a few seconds of video off one of them. If I can work out a way of doing it in some sort of controlled manner I may try a drastic solution. It is what is done with old audio tapes, and it is to bake the tapes before trying to use them. The spools of tape are literally put into an oven set to just below the melting point of the plastic, and left to bake for a few hours.

  In the case of audio tapes it stops them shedding oxide (the rust that is the actual recording medium). My hope is that it might help "relax" the tape in the video cassettes. I can't actually see what is going on, but I have a theory that maybe the tape has become just stiff enough that it can't lie flat against the spinning video heads. I don't think I have anything to lose by trying to bake the tapes, although obviously I will try it on one first, but I don't know yet how I am going to get an "oven" that runs at a suitable temperature. It might come down to a 60W lightbulb in a box or something.

  I did successfully transfer most of two non-Sony tapes, but both suffer from the same problem - they are so "bitty", a bit of this, and a bit of that, that I doubt I can edit the bits together to make some sort of coherent video that would mean anything to anybody except for me. It was sort of nostalgic watching, and listening* to all those short clips, but it is hard to make a story from them.

* After some experimenting  finally managed to find the setting that allows me to monitor the sound as I do the transfer. I hope that I have also fixed whatever it was that broke the synchronisation between the sound and pictures.

  Through the day I resisted the urge to eat far more than is good for me, although if it had been a hot and sunny day I would have eaten even less if I could have wielded the self control I did yesterday. For breakfast I think it was one bowl of instant noodles. Lunch was a single can of Oxtail soup, and an afternoon snack was 4 rice cakes with cheese and ham on them.

  Dinner was a fairly big "stew" of diced beef with button mushrooms plus spinach, lots of spinach. I have no idea why I bought such a huge bag of spinach from Aldi. I know that spinach shrinks a lot when cooked, but I don't think I am going to be able to use it all up before it goes off. Last night's dinner had enough lightly cooked spinach in it that the oxalic acid from those leaves really made my teeth itch ! https://www.compoundchem.com/2018/07/17/spinach/

  I was in bed and asleep by about 9.30pm last night. On the whole I slept well, even very well at one point, but also there were a few bad times. The very good bit of sleep concerned getting up for a pee. I got up for a pee, and went back to bed. It felt like only a few minutes passed when I realised I needed another pee. I thought that was very wrong, but once I opened my eyes, and looked at the clock, I realised those "few minutes" were actually closer to three hours !

  The bad was probably the extra fiercely hot chilli sauce I added to my dinner as it cooked. I never noticed it bringing me out in a sweat, but after going back to bed after a pee quite early in the night it felt mike the top of my duvet was cold and damp. I had to shuffle around in bed to try and get warm again. Other than that, I felt warm enough under the duvet, but I think I have a higher tog rated duvet that I will start to use as the nights get even colder.

  I even managed to have a lie in this morning. I woke up at about 5.50am, and considered getting up because it was close to 6am, but I resisted the idea, and then suddenly it was just gone 7am. Despite the potential of that presumed night sweat leaving me a bit dehydrated, I was impatient to see if my restraint from eating had improved my blood glucose reading this morning. It had, and it was rather a good drop from 9.5mmol/l yesterday morning to just 7.8mmol/l this morning. It is a bit late in the month to get a good average, but there is still a very good chance that this month's average will be slightly below the averages of the previous two months.

  There is just one important thing happening today, or at least I hope it will. Just before lunchtime (1pm) I shall take a walk through the park to meet Angela in the pub for an hour. Some of today's topic will be like several recently - health. I have yet to tell Angela that I am no longer taking Clopidogrel, blood thinning tablets, and how a lot of my joint pains are very much improved. It will be interesting to see if the ache I was getting in my ankles has now improved as I walk through the park. I will also be able to tell Angela that I got a phone call from the surgery last Friday to book my 'flu jab. I kept forgetting to mention it here until just now. The jab takes place on Saturday morning.