This morning started very chilly, just 7° C on my thermometers, and there was a glorious, but doom laden red sunrise ! The latest revision to the forecast has brought forward the first rain to 9am. The worst of the rain may be over after midday, but there could still be passing showers popping up any time today. It is surprising that with no sunshine forecast at all today, the afternoon temperature could reach 13° C, but with no supporting sunshine that will feel cold. Tomorrow's forecast uses lots of that strange symbol of a white cloud with the sun behind it, and one or two drops of rain falling from it. It seems to suggest it will still be bright when pouring with rain, but I don't think that is ever the case. Anyway there could be a lot of it tomorrow, but it might actually be a couple of degrees warmer at 15° C.

  Yesterday was one of those odd days when it didn't seem I was particularly productive, but the hours seemed to slip past so easily and painlessly. The best thing about yesterday was that after priming my bedroom with some heat from my fan heater, I could turn that off until the evening to leave the sun to warm it up - and it warmed it up a lot !

  One thing that definitely counts as productive that I did yesterday was to do a bit of laundry by hand. It included a hand towel to make it a little bit harder work. Like most towels it needed extra rinsing, but one extra seemed to be enough. I guess I was feeling OK because apart from letting it all soak for as much as an hour, I did the rest of the wash non stop. I guess I could have taken the chance and tried to dry it outside in the sunshine, but I took the safe option and dried it all on the clothes horse.

  I have to admit there were several times when I went into extreme lazy mood yesterday. I just couldn't resist the lure of laying on my sunshine soaked bed, and mixed reading with periods of just closing my eyes. For some reason I can't seem to actually recall snoozing, although that was obviously intended. I thought my lunch of another small plate of oven chips may have made me dozy, but evidently not. Later on I had some Marmite rice cakes with cheese on them.

  The big change in routine was just after 4pm when my order from Amazon arrived. The most important part of that order was a case for my new (secondhand) Huawei P30 Pro phone. I actually ordered two cases because I had slight doubts that one would fit properly, but is seems both were fine. I also ordered a pack of screen protectors that I have yet to apply. One thing I could have ordered at the same time if I had known I needed it, was a nano memory card.

  These nano memory cards (NM cards) are to a newish standard that only Huawei have decided to use. They are therefore a bit rare, and also a bit expensive. I did end up ordering a 128GB card at a cost of £32. That is rather expensive, and probably a waste of money. The new phone has 128GB of memory, and I can manage my usage of the memory better than most because once I have taken a lot of photos and videos, the latter taking up most space, I can easily move them to my PC. I had a 16GB card in my old phone, and hadn't used more than half of it.

  I didn't need the memory card to get started in the traumatic process of effectively cloning the old phone to the new. Huawei phones, and possibly others, come with an app called Phone Clone that does all the hard work with just a few clicks. It is not infallible though. I don't think it managed to copy my SMS (txt) message across, and I had to rely on an app called SMS Backup to do it properly, although that appeared not to work until I rebooted the phone. The weird omission was all the names on Whatsapp messaging. The name have been replaced by phone numbers. I suspect/hope that the names will re-appear when I actually send or receive something from the people involved.

  The process of cloning the phone probably only took 20 minutes, but all the checking and tidying up took hours. It was only this morning that I sent myself a test message to see if the SMS (txt) service was working. One thing I didn't check was to see if there was a reminder light at the top of the phone to say a message had arrived. There seems to be no indicator light on the front of the screen. I've just called the phone to check it rings OK, but there it seems there is no visible notification of a call, or missed call except the message on the screen which you can't see until you wake the phone up. That seems like a bad idea to me.

  I got most of the phone stuff done in time to having a relaxing dinner while watching a bit of TV. Dinner was a lamb stew featuring little more than diced lamb, stock cubes, and a lot of cauliflower and cabbage, and that was a lot of cabbage ! It was extremely nice even if probably unhealthy. The fat from the lamb gave the cabbage a nice slippery glaze. With so much cabbage I didn't feel the need for anything later.

  It was probably the excitement of a new shiny, the new phone now all set up, that made getting to sleep initially hard. I have no real idea what time I fell asleep, but it might have been as late as 11pm. Once I was asleep I seemed to sleep well. I can't recall any period of insomnia in the night, and for some reason I think I probably got up to pee less than usual. I did conveniently wake up a little after 4am, and turned on the fan heater on low to warm my bedroom up. After a very cold night my room temperature had dropped to several degrees below comfort level. It is annoying that with no sunshine today I will probably have to run the heater on low all day.

  I was going to mention something about some of the copious dreams I think I had, but when I try to think about them I realise most have faded to nothing, or any context has gone. All I can do is remember a few snapshot like memories of a couple of dreams. For instance I can remember walking down the road with Jo from Chain. She is a vegetarian, but we were going to buy fried chicken, and she wanted mint sauce on it. That is all I can remember of the dream. Maybe it did only last as long as the sentence I used to describe it, but as a memory it mostly lacks any context. I have no idea where that road was, or even what it looked like. I have no idea where we came form, or if we ever found a chicken shop.

  I think it possible I had another dream that involved food, but I have zero memory of it. I didn't even wake up feeling hungry, but that didn't stop me having a warming bowl of chicken flavour instant noodles. With a nice low blood glucose reading of 8.2mmol/l I think I was entitled to a breakfast this morning. The only mystery is why that reading wasn't as low as the yesterday morning. I don't think I ate anything that different to the day before yesterday. Maybe it is just that today I used the last test strip in the meter, and I have suspected their accuracy starts to fail as you use the last strips several times in the past.
 The most notable thing about this morning was sunrise. That brilliant pink, orange and red sunrise foretells of a terrible day according to weather lore. The weather forecast agrees with it ! It has already rained once, and before the weather forecast said it was allowed to ! It seems today will not be an outdoor day, although I may be brave enough to go and get a bit of shopping from Tesco today - although nothing is essential.

  I won't be doing anything before a great event takes place. It was on the 26th of last month when I got an email to say my order of a beer advent calendar from Beerwulf was ready to ship. Until yesterday the status had not changed a bit. Yesterday I was informed that Yodel now had it, and this morning their tracking page says it is at their local depot. It should be out for delivery today, and most of their drivers tend to get their deliveries done by midday. Fingers crossed that I will soon get a notification of a projected delivery time.