Today may be a little brighter than shown in the early version of the forecast above. 8, 9, and 10am are now shown as full sunshine, and 2pm is now predicted to have sunny spells. I would not be surprised if later revisions improved on that. For all that it will be another cool feeling day. The afternoon high will be 15° C, but this morning was over estimated to be 10° C. All my thermometers agree it was between 7 and 8° C. Rain is still predicted to fall from 8pm tonight.  The first half of tomorrow is forecast to be very wet, but that will also be the warmest  part of the day if 12° C can be called warm. The afternoon may not be any higher than 11° C. Winter is coming !

  Just after I finished writing yesterday I received a text message bearing bad news. My "punishment" for not being enthusiastic about going to Angela's wedding next year is that she is going to stop seeing me on Wednesday lunchtimes. She actually said "she will be giving Wednesdays a break for some time". I guess that leaves room for a reconciliation in the future, but I can help think I'll just be flogging a dead horse if I don't give up on her, and let her live her life in the marital bliss she obviously hopes for.

  I predicted I would do two things yesterday, and I did both. One was a slightly longer task than predicted. With no prospect of seeing Angela today, I decided to post her birthday card to her. If Royal Mail weren't on strike today, tomorrow, and the day after, she would have got it just 4 days late. I think her birthday present will have to become a Xmas present.

  After a mad dash in the rain to the Post Box I walked to Poundstretcher to buy quite a few things. They included several bags of "high energy" bird seed, and some bird grade peanuts. I found a selection of candles to buy, but I note that even smelly candles, which are no good for lighting a room during a winter power cut (which we may see this winter thanks the the government mismanaging the country), have gone up in price, and will probably continue to rise.

  Other stuff I bought included some medical supplies. Now and then I have been using an elbow support device - essentially a thick tubular bandage. It does seem to help my aching elbow joint. That joint did seem to improve a lot when I came off Clopidogrel, the blood thinning drug. The trouble is it only made it happen less, but when it does it is still a most annoying ache. I am not sure if the support bandage helps in any other way that just as a device to keep the joint warmer if I am wearing a short sleeved shirt, or when I haven't got a top on at all like when I was sleeping last night.

  I was certainly happy to put that support bandage on in the middle of the night when going out to the cold toilet triggered some strong aching. I decided that buy a spare might be prudent. I also bought two different types of wrist support because if I do a lot of mouse work on my PC my wrist sometimes complains. One trouble is that until I got home I had not noticed that those wrist supports came in different sizes. It was obvious when I compared the two boxes side by side. One of the two I bought was a "small" and is almost useless. The other I think was "medium", and that goes on OK, but as yet I have had no opportunity to see if they work.

  The only other thing of note that I did yesterday was to hand wash a bath towel. Fortunately it was only a medium sized bath towel because it was really hard work, and I ended up doing it in three stages. The problem was that I kept using the towel long after I should have washed it. That meant it had sucked up some shower gel, as well as some greasy body sweat. I am not sure how it sucked up shower gel because I do take some trouble to rinse myself off thoroughly, but every time I wash a bath towel it seems almost to have it's own soap in it. It took 5 (or 7) rinses until the rinse water was almost clear. It was the need to do all those rinses that made me break it up in three sections with a rest between them.

  It was cold yesterday, and for a lot of the day I felt cold despite wearing my winter clothes. I was also a bit depressed about not seeing Angela, possibly for ever. It was the perfect recipe to over eat. Fortunately, spurred on by my high blood glucose reading in the morning, I kept control of what I was eating. For a slightly early lunch I had a ramen pot noodle that I had bought from Poundstretcher. I bought 4 pots from there - two were the chicken flavour I had tried from a previous visit to Poundstretcher. Yesterday I also bough one soy sauce flavour, and the other was plain ramen flavour.

  I have now tried all three flavours, and they all seem pretty nice, and all are moderately low sugar. Later in the afternoon I wanted something meaty, and I grilled some beefburgers. I ate them with just a squirt of tomato sauce. They were in that mystery land between nice, and not nice.  I didn't enjoy them as much as I hoped. They were frozen, and were probably mainly meat slurry. Aldi do some nice fresh beef burgers, and some that are spoiled by having a sort of greasy taste.

  There was one other significant thing I did yesterday, and it was to give up on the book I was reading, and starting a new one. The previous book I managed to read most of was "The Martians" by Kim Stanley Robinson. It had a sort of story line, but was made up of chunks of stuff that hardly seemed relevant. One very long chapter was about climbing the highest mount on Mars (actually an extinct volcano - Olympus Mons). It was a very detailed chapter, but maybe only one appreciated by a mountain climber. It was full of technical mountaineering terms that the layman, me included, could only make educated guesses at.

  Another chapter that I just skipped over was full of poems written by the Martians (originally colonists from Earth). Then there were pages and pages of almost legalese detailing the constitution of Mars, and all it's revisions. On the whole it was not an enjoyable book to read. I also had the sequel (or one of them) to it, and that was the book I managed to read maybe 50 pages before deciding I just was not enjoying it. I think those two books are going on the pile that I will be donating to a charity shop, or dumping on one of the free libraries that pop up on railways stations or in pubs. I hope someone can get more enjoyment out of them than me.

  By 6pm, almost a couple of hours after sunset, it was feeling cold, and I was feeling hungry again. I must admit ot was a sort of cold induced hunger more than anything else. I thought I had just about had my ration for the day, but decided that a couple of cans of soup would be OK. I had a can of Tesco Cream Of Chicken soup (very low sugar content) and a can of pea and ham soup (quite low sugar content). They seemed to do the trick, and I seemed to almost feel warm enough until it was time to get under the duvet and go to sleep - albeit some 3 or 4 hours later.

  I'm not sure if I slept OK or not. Perhaps by that I mean I don't know if I got sufficient sleep. I known that some bits of my sleep were not OK. A few simple negatives were my elbow really aching after going to the cold bathroom in the night, and feeling very hungry at about 4am this morning. I don't actually remember doing it, but the damp pillow, and top edge of the duvet said that I must have had a period of sweating in the night. Maybe it was fear !

  One long rambling dream did have some strong reasons for fear. I can't remember that much about it all, but the basic thing was that there were overhead power lines that sometime seemed far too low - too low considering they were carrying 500kv (or half a million volts !). To make mattes worse they were carrying DC (direct current), and unlike AC, where the current reverses 50 times a second (in this country), they could charge things up like static electricity. I have no idea where I was going in the dream (or dreams), but it was a very perilous journey !

  One thing I think I can say was that my sweating in the night was not due to high blood glucose. This morning my diligence yesterday was rewarded with a very nice low reading of 7.5mmol/l. I wish that guaranteed that I would feel great this morning, but I don't. It could be low temperature related, but I seem to have some lower back pain. I need to keep a reasonable posture when writing this to avoid any pain. A few other bits hurt as well, but my elbow support bandage seems to be keeping my elbow just about happy.

  I have only one plan for today, and that is to go to the pub as usual on a Wednesday. I think I'll do it the lazy way via a train to Ladywell, but that is more to do with picking up a copy of The Metro at the station so I can do the crossword while sitting in the pub alone. I won't be completely alone because Asia (or Ayshia ?) will usually be a bit chatty - unless she castigates me for not being enthusiastic about going to Angela's wedding next June. If she does I will finish my pint and leave. There is a microscopic chance that Angela may still pop in thinking I won't be there. That could be a frosty or warm time, but probably frosty.
  At 11:47am the sunny periods were supposed to be over, and it was supposed to be raining. The rain was actually supposed to have started a couple of hours previously in the early version of the weather forecast. If I had waited a couple of minutes before taking the picture it would have included bright sunshine as well as blue sky. If I had waited another 20 minutes I could have taken the picture without the old, and redundant aerial on the right of the picture. If I had waited another 10 minutes after that the sky would have been black, and there would be almost an hour of moderately heavy rain before the sun came out again. Yesterday's various revisions of the weather forecast got the main ingredients correct, sunshine and rain, but completely failed to get the times and lengths of both very wrong.
  Notice how they say "at no extra cost". To be truthful they should add "for 2 months then there will definitely be extra cost". It has happened every time there has been a "free upgrade" over the last 9 or 10 years. If it wasn't for the hassle of sorting out getting these web pages on a different suppliers connection I would seriously think of changing ISP.