This morning's forecast brings no joy. At first I thought it had started wrong, but when I looked out of the window again I could see that it was raining. Just to be awkward I think I would describe what is falling right now as very heavy drizzle. In other words fine raindrops, but so many that everything is immediately saturated. If there is anything good about it all it is that it was a mild night, and the current temperature is a tad over 14° C. If the forecast is right it will soon drop a degree, rise again, and then fall to 11° C at the end of the day. One weather curiosity is that the BBC forecast has a headline that says heavy rain, but each individual hour is shown as light rain. They don't even mention the thunderstorm that The Met Office predicts for 3pm (in the latest revision it has moved by an hour, and so may never happen). One other oddity is that 4pm is now shown as full sunshine ! Tomorrow may be a little bit warmer, and may only feature some passing showers, but probably no sunshine.

  I seemed to do very little yesterday, but it wasn't until late afternoon that I became bored. Before then time seemed to pass by quite quickly. For a while it was helped along by a shopping trip to Tesco. I suppose one other thing I did was some washing up, but with all that time on my hands I didn't even seem to find the enthusiasm for a nice warm shower. Prior to going to Tesco I did have a quick flannel wash of all the usual places.

  My shopping trip was principally to buy some meat and vegetables, but of course I came away with more than that. With no sunshine to warm my bedroom, and the heater taking it's time to warm the room above 22° C, I was feeling cold enough to put on my thick, hooded, winter coat. That coat is certainly warm, but in all the years I've owned it ( 5 or more years) it has never been a good fit. I suppose it is sort of good that it has got no worse since I bought it. By time I got home it felt like I was gently cooking in it !

  Among the other stuff I bought were the usual couple of bottles of Diet Coke, and after spotting it was on special Club Card offer, a one litre bottle of Smirnoff. The worst things I bought were a couple of Ginsters "slices" with reduced price stickers on them. One was a chicken and mushroom slice, and the other a peppered steak slice. I regret buying them now. Maybe it is a long term legacy of covid changing my tastebuds, but they didn't seem to be very tasty, or at least not how I remember them. To add insult to injury, when I re-checked the reduce price sticker I saw they were only reduced by 40p. I suspect they would have been nicer at half price !

  The two books before the current book I am reading were not exactly hard going, but just couldn't seem to excite me. The second was a sequel to the first, and I gave up on that less than 10% of the way through it. The book I am currently reading, "Run To The Stars" by Michael Scott Rohan, is a sort of thriller, and even has some loosely described sex in it. It may not be exactly gripping, but is a nice pleasant easy read, and maybe ideal for gloomy wet days. I filled in many dull moments, and on a dull wet day like yesterday ther were plenty of them, by laying on my bed reading. Like the previous day, I know I fancied a snooze (mainly as another time wasting exercise) but I don't think I had one.
  I realise I am getting ahead of myself, and forgetting important stuff from the morning. It was just after 11am when I delivery I have been waiting for, for ages, was finally delivered. It is the first of two beer advent calendars I ordered. The second one should be delivered later this month. If there was one thing wrong with the one pictures it was that the inner box, as pictured, was so tightly packed in the plain outer box, that I had to turn it upside down to shake it out - with beer bottles and cans spilling out all over the floor.
  It was getting that beer delivery that released me to go out shopping.  It was the first opportunity to try the camera in my new phone - and the camera was the reason I wanted the new phone. On such a dull and gloomy day there was nothing that seemed worth taking a picture of. I was almost at Tesco when I thought I would take a photo inside the multi story car park I was walking through. It is a meaningless picture, but it was a fair test of the camera under odd lighting. This picture is actually a slice through a picture originally taken in portrait mode. The definition seems good, and there is no obvious distortion to the sides of the picture as some poor lenses can give.

  There are a few things about the phone camera that I am not happy with. The worst thing is that there is no obvious way to take lower resolution pictures for sending with messages, or maybe I have just not found where the setting hides. There is a "pro" option that allows a few things/parameters to be changed, and that will have to be played with sometime.
  If I had taken my phone with me when I went to feed the birds in the early afternoon, I could have taken this picture using it, but I left the phone up in my bedroom. So this picture of what I have learned is an Ameranthus was taken with one of my older Canon pocket cameras, a "Canon DIGITAL IXUS 80 IS" - as copied from the exif data.
  There are two ameranthus plants still growing, and flowering, in my garden. This second one has been badly eaten by slugs or snails. I think both grew from the very liberal sowing of "bird and butterfly" attracting plant seeds. In theory there could have been many more plants from those seeds, but I expect the birds had more than their fair share. I took the pictures so I had a reference when I tried to search for their names online.

  Ameranthus is a name that covers many similar plants, and I never did positively identify which particular ones these were. Wikipedia names over 50 varieties at the bottom of this page. I didn't have the stamina to check each variety to find a perfect match, but I think the top picture may be of the variety that is called "Love Lies Bleeding". (sort of appropriate for my situation with Angela at the moment).

  There was one other little thing I did before giving up and watching old videos, and that was to have a play with Bluetooth file transfers, and in particular copying pictures from phone to PC via Bluetooth. In theory the reverse direction should be doable as well, but I never went that far. I can reliably transfer pictures from my phone to my main PC, although it is quicker and easier to do it by cable, and maybe more usefully to the PC on the dining room table that is mostly, but not exclusively for playing music while drinking. Transfers to that dining table PC could be useful for Jodie or Michael to copy pictures to that PC for showing on a bigger PC screen.

  I spent the last hours of the day watching old TV recordings. I am now on series 4 of Drop The Dead Donkey, and I also watched a single episode of Bottom. I should have been eating my specially cooked dinner while watching one of those recordings, but when it came down to it I found I wasn't quite hungry, or at least not for a beef stew with sprouts and leeks. I did still feel a bit peckish though. I think I had a deep desire to try a couple of new cheeses I had bought in Tesco, and it seemed like a good time to do it.

  In theory it was a bit of a light meal, but maybe it wasn't. I had four lightly salted rice cakes. Two of them had Wensleydale cheese with sour cherries in it, and the other two had cheddar with smoked tomatoes and onion (?). Both seemed to be exciting cheeses. Both were a little bit expensive. I am not keen on Wensleydale, and having sour cherries in it didn't improve it. So that was a waste of money. The other cheese was nice, but maybe not as good as my wild imagination thought it would be.

  One trouble with watching video recordings is that you aren't constantly reminded of the time like you would be when watching broadcast TV. I am pretty certain I gave up and headed to be sometime around 8pm. I read in bed before turning the light off, and a wild stab in the dark makes me think that might have been close to 8.30pm, but my guess could easily been out by an hour or two. As far as I can remember I fell asleep very quickly after turning out the light.

  It is hard to say if I slept well or not. I don't remember any time when I was awake for more than a few minutes. I also didn't seem to get up to pee nearly as often as usual. I do remember waking up to find I had been sweating, but I think I was only awake long enough to turn the top pillow around, and pull the duvet slightly to the side. I think it was around 5am when I woke up to go for a pee, and to flush the toilet. I also turned the fan heater on low, and nearly refreshed the weather forecasts on my PC, but I didn't bother in the end. I got into my bed, and sort of laid there thinking I would not get back to sleep. It was another of those occasions when the enxt thing I knew over 2 hours had slipped by unnoticed.

  There are a few worst things about this morning. The awful depressing wet and gloomy weather is a good candidate. Another is my blood glucose. I thought I was reasonably safe with rice cakes and cheese, but apparently not. This morning a small series of good readings was mucked up by a reading of 9.1mmol/l. That is still a fair way below the red line, and if it is as I hope, just one of those sporadic outliers that only slightly increases my monthly average.

  Maybe the worst thing about that high reading is that today is not an ideal day to do a bit of fasting. The foul weather, and having nothing to do to distract me from eating, is going to make avoiding food really hard. Another downer is that I am going to have to keep the heater on low or shiver today. At least for now I have broken the habit of many years of keeping the heater on low all night. Maybe that will have to happen when the temperature gets close to freezing, or even below freezing, but for now it is a case of being as frugal as possible without ending up in pain from aching joints and chest.