At some time in the night, possibly just before sunrise, some rain fell. It is possible there may have even been some very fine rain later than that. It is still very cloudy now, but the sun is trying to break through the cloud. We just had a 3 second burst of weak sunshine. There should be more to come, but the latest revision to the forecast has added showers at 2pm, but that seems to be instead of the shower shown in the screenshot above at 4pm. The heavy rain at 7pm seems like it might be a bit more definite. Once again the afternoon high will be 18° C. Both the BBC and Met Office agree that tomorrow will be a very sunny day, but also a cooler day with no more than 16° C expected.
  Yesterday was a satisfactory sort of day. It ended up as being a more productive day than I imagined it would be. The first thing of note was a shopping trip to Aldi. It was partly to buy a few things I either forgot to buy, or just didn't think I had enough room in my bag to buy when I went to Tesco the day before. Like that shopping trip to Tesco, I also bought another 4 or 5 cans of soup, and other long life stuff, but also a sort of treat for myself.

  I am not so sure it as a treat. It was a maplewood smoked bacon quiche. It looked like it would be better than it actually was. Maybe heating it in the oven, as per the instructions on the packet, would have made it nicer, but I doubt it. It is even possible it would have made it worse. Somehow I feel that quiche has to be eaten cold. It wasn't exactly a low sugar food, and definitely not low calorie, but I think it was lower on both scores to what I expected.

  When I had recovered from the walk to Aldi, and devouring the whole quiche, I set about washing what seems to be my favourite cool weather top. I must admit that I only wear it indoors, and when I have no visitors (which is most of the time), and so I only wash it when it has too many gravy stains down the front !! I hung it on the clothes horse to dry with the fan on it. To my surprise, the extra warmth from the sunshine through the front room windows, and maybe some fresh air when I opened the windows for a few hours, seemed to 96% dry it by the end of the evening.

  One diversion in the late morning/early afternoon, was seeing Simon, the local Siamese cat, pounce on something in my garden. Day after day he sits very patiently waiting for a mouse or rat to appear, and I have never actually seen him pounce. I am sure he had nothing in his mouth when he emerged from the overgrown flower bed, but maybe he went back after I stopped looking. A little later I went out to put some bird seen out, and spotted a corpse on the lawn.
  I didn't inspect it from closer than a few feet, but all I could see was a dark puncture wound on the neck (you can see it in the photo). I assumed it was very dead because it was visited by a magpie twice. The first time the bird just pecked at it a couple of times. I think it was trying to peck through the tail. On the second visit it actually dragged the rat a foot or two by it's tail. While taking this photo I noticed another dead rat at the base of the metal bird feeder. It looked as if it may have been killed the day before because it was attracting a lot of flies.

  I didn't feel like digging holes to bury the corpses yesterday, and so I left it all as I found it. There was also a chance that something would make a meal out of them, or even Simon might return to take a trophy home with him. This morning there was no trace of the rat in the picture. It might be possible it was just stunned, rather than dead, and made it's way home under cover of darkness. There is a chance a passing fox might have had it as a snack, although I have seen no evidence of foxes in my garden for ages now. My best theory was that a crow picked it up at first light this morning.

  The final thing I had to do was to doing some washing up, and that included the glasses for beer tasting a bit later in the afternoon.  I still had some time left after that, and used it to do some research. Curiosity drove me to find out if it was still possible to get new batteries for my approx 1985 vintage Sony Hi8 camcorder. To do that I had to check what the number was on my old batteries. That lead on to two things.

  The first was that, yes, it is possible to buy new batteries, and Amazon have a selection of them listed. Rather than the original NiCad batteries, the replacement batteries were NiMh batteries, and they have a higher capacity than NiCad - approx three times the capacity. I was almost tempted to buy one before I realized it would be a silly idea.

  The other thing was to see if there was any life in the old batteries - and there was ! All were completely flat after not being touched for  years or more. One wouldn't take a charge, but the other three did. One of those was an original Sony battery, but I think one of it's cells is short circuit. It takes a charge, but never really charges. The other two were "Camlink" universal replacement batteries, and both took a charge.

   One of those Camlink batteries ran the camcorder for 5 or 6 minutes. I didn't have the time to check the other, but my guess would be that it would last a similar time.  If I was feeling daft I could go out with the two batteries, and video a few passing trains provided I quickly turned the camcorder off between uses. It would be an interesting, but pointless exercise. My mobile phone takes far better video than that old camcorder ever did !

  Jodie arrived just a little after 3.30pm yesterday. She had gone via the very expensive bottle bar in Catford looking for a specific beer - a Canadian brewed beer. Apparently it was Canadian beer day on the untappd web site, and she could have earned a badge for booking in a Canadian beer she had drunk yesterday. Such a badge has no physical presence, and is just an image on a screen, but ii seems it is good for her ego.

  I'm not sure that any beer we drank yesterday was particularly good, but a few were acceptable. One beer in particular, a peach and raspberry beer (if such a mess can be called a beer) was interesting. I expected Jodie to like it. It seemed to be the typical sour fruity taste she likes, and I don't. To my surprise she hated it. Also to my surprise I found that the more of it I drank, the less horrible it was. I can't say I ever liked it, but towards the end I had ceased to strongly dislike it.

  Jodie left just after 6pm to get the 6.28 train, and I heated up my pre-cooked dinner. Once again I could not be bothered to add the vegetables I was going to add to it. The previous night I couldn't be bothered to prepare the cauliflower I was going to add to it, and last night I couldn't be bothered to add the mange tout that was my latest idea of adding some green stuff to it. However I did have some raw mange tout to nibble on during the beer drinking.

  The one thing I did add was some peppercorn sauce granules. It added a bit of piquancy to the gravy. Without being bulked up with vegetables it made for quite a small portion (unless I had drunk all the gravy the chicken was swimming in). It wasn't a lot later, while watching TV, that I fancied a bit more. I used the last 4 slices of the small loaf of multi seed bread I had bought from Tesco the day before. I made some nice sandwiches, but I was convinced that eating bread that late in the day would be a disaster for my blood glucose reading in the morning.

  I went to bed just after 10pm, and after reading for maybe 15 minutes my eye lids were drooping. I put the book down, turned out the light, and was asleep in minutes. I had another pretty good night's sleep last night. I can remember having two bits of dreams, and as I write this only one comes to mind. It started to snow quite heavily as the weather than had dumped deep snow on Washington (USA) blew over the Atlantic. There is a lot of forgotten dialogue from this dream, but I do remember saying that October was a bit early for snow, and that it seemed we were going to have another very long winter this year.

  I can't remember anything of the second bit of dream I wanted to try and remember - except that I have a feeling it had cats in it. Like most morning recently, I forced myself to keep going to sleep in the last hour so I didn't have to get up until gone 6am. I actually got up at about 6.30am. I dreaded doing it, but I checked my blood glucose as soon as I had been to the toilet. I was startled to see it was just 8.4mmol/l. I was truly expecting to top yesterday's 9.0mmol/l, but it seems not. The only trouble with watching my sugar intake, although I didn't really do that with any sincerity yesterday, is that I am ignoring the calorie content. At the moment I dare not get on the scales because I doubt I would like what I would see !

  I don't know what I am going to do today. I had been hoping that I might hear from Angela to say she was back at work, and we could meet at lunch time, but it is rare she works on a Friday these days. I probably ought to go out and do something today, and with the threat of rain something like a a few hours on the trains could be sensible. On the other hand I am not sure if I fancy that today. One thing I will do, after I have had a shower, and washed my hair, is to wash a few t-shirts. Yesterday Jodie delivered a brand new Flame Pilots t-shirt.
  It is not often I see The Flame Pilots because they are based on the Kent coast, but the next time I see them I'll have their t-shirt on. I tried the t-shirt on yesterday, and it just fits, but smells very musty. I think it will be a lot better after a good was and fabric conditioning. Te other thing I think I am liable to do today is some more video work. If I am feeling creative I may try to edit together something coherent from the stuff I have already transferred from Hi8 analogue tape, or maybe just try and transfer more taped to my computer.