The forecast for today at 9pm last night showed far more sunshine than this morning's forecast. The screenshot above, taken at 7am has not really changed in the 9am revision. It is sunny as I type this, and sunny spells should continue unto midday, but after that it will be grey. Fortunately it should stay dry. The forecast at 9pm last night, which I will show further down the page, said the sunny spells should last until gone 3pm. It is possible that early forecast will turn out to match reality just like the forecast for yesterday made the previous night. It would seem the this morning's sunshine will push the temperature up to 12° C, but it may not take long to drop again to 11° C. Last night was a cold night, and maybe tonight will be even colder...Tomorrow morning is predicted to start at 7° C, and a whole day of grey sky may only see the temperature briefly touch 10° C with 9° C more representative of the day.

  Sometimes insanity seems the better path ! The reason for that idea will become clearer as I describe my day, yesterday. Once I had finished writing yesterday a lot of the morning had already passed. It must have been getting on for midday before I had a shower, and then, because it was quite a hot shower, I spent a lazy half hour cooling off before going to Tesco to get a bit of shopping.

  As I recorded yesterday, my blood glucose was not dangerously high yesterday morning, but it was far higher than is good for me. In a sane world I would be fasting for much of yesterday, but this is where a touch of insanity came into being. As I walked to Tesco I seemed to have a fixation that I wanted a sandwich or two. Ideally I would buy some known low sugar bread (many wholemeal loaves don't use any sugar in the recipe), but Tesco do not seem to have reliable supplies of decent bread.

  My other option was to buy a ready made sandwich. Out of all the many options there are a couple that have a reasonably low sugar content. Grabbing a couple of those would be almost, but not quite sane. Seeing some chicken Caesar wraps, and bean wraps at almost half price, and grabbing two Chicken Caesar wraps, and one bean wrap, was more than silly, and in fact stupid....or so I thought.

  More sane things from Tesco were a couple of packs of rice cakes, one plain, and the other Marmite flavour, plus things like cheese, ham, and even garlic sausage to have on the rice cakes.  I also bought a bit of meat and other stuff for future dinners. Then, with four 2 litre bottles of Diet Coke in my rucksack I made my way home. I had worn my thick winter coat because it was barely 10° C outside, but with some sun on my back, and carrying all that load, I was feeling very hot when I got home. Other than that, the walk to and from Tesco seemed pleasant enough.

  After getting home, and putting the shopping away, I stuffed my face with the three packs of half price wraps. They were good-ish, but maybe not as good as a proper sandwich, or even wholemeal roll filled with a thick slice of cheddar, and a slice of onion. Of course the trouble with the latter would be onion flavoured burps for half the afternoon. It must have been around 1pm when I had finished eating, and ideally I would have a lay down to digest it, but I also had some washing up to do - the glasses for the beer tasting session, and the casserole dish so I could start preparing, and part cooking my dinner.

  I barely had time to relax when Michael sent me a text message saying he was in Tesco, and had driven there, and asking of I wanted some bottles of Diet Coke. I replied yes please. That did mean I would have quite a stock of Diet Coke, but it won't be wasted, and will save me carrying another lot back the next time I am shopping in Tesco (or Aldi). I then had about a 45 minute rest before Michael drove up outside, and I went out to meet him. After getting the drinks form him he said he would join Jodie and myself for the afternoon beer tasting session.

  It was quite a good session, and at one point there were 4 of us. Initially it was just me, Jodie and Michael. We didn't seem to drink very much at all, and I squeezed in an extra can of Guinness because Jodie was drinking so slowly. Michael was talking ten to the dozen, and much of it was about his soon to be new mobile phone - my old phone. It is so hard to convince him that for the essentials, the new phone is going to be no different to his old phone. He is close to panic about whether he will be able to use it.

  I think it was 10 or 15 past 5pm when we were joined by Alan, Jodie's boyfriend. He had brought me a present. The last time I saw him he said he had an old laptop I could use as a spare web server (this page is being served by an old HP laptop). Yesterday he brought the "old" laptop for me, and I am not 100% sure, but I think it is slightly newer than my current, but rarely used laptop. Both are Dell Latitudes, and the type number suggests it is a later model than mine.

  The big difference is that my Dell laptop works perfectly - even down to the battery having a very useful lifetime before it goes flat. It was a "renewed", i.e. cleaned up ex-company laptop, bought from Amazon, and a bargain at just £120. The laptop Alan gave me would be more expensive because it has a few more ports, and also has a cellular radio modem in it so it can connect to the internet via a 4G sim card. Unfortunately it has a very perplexing fault on it.

  It frequently refuses to start up, the very little time I had to play with it suggested it is either a battery fault, or a fault in the internal charge regulator for the battery. It did seem to work OK with no battery in it. Like that it went through several reboots with no problem. As soon as I put the battery in, and tried to reboot it, it didn't respond at all. I have a feeling that it needed to cool down. I took the battery out, and this morning it is my theory that it will start up first time when using the AC adapter. If that is so it suggests a quite serious fault - mainly for a couple of reasons. It could be a real pain in the rear stripping it down to get to the main circuit board to do any repair. It could be as simple as a soldered joint needing to be reflowed, but it might not be easy, or even possible to find where the power control circuits are on the main circuit board. Even if I did know where to look it could be an almost impossible repair without using the stereo microscope I used to use at work to do the sort of micro surgery required.

  The real negative thing is that if it was in good working order it might be too good to waste just serving web pages a few times a day. On the other hand, if the only way it works is to run it off AC power, with the battery removed, than I guess that is the best use for it. Anyway, back to early evening yesterday. Michael left soon after Alan arrived, and Jodie and Alan left to the the 7.05 train to Peckham Rye where they were visiting a brewery.

  I had put the vegetables into my beef stew dinner before everyone left, and as soon as I was on my own I sat down with my dinner, and watched The Simpsons on Channel 4+1. I had missed all the Star Trek episodes I might have watched. There is an annoying 20 minute break between the end of The Simpsons, and an episode of QI on Dave. I used that time to give the casserole a quick rinse (I'll wash it properly today). It wasn't a great episode of QI, but it entertained me enough. I decided not bother with any more TV after that. It was still fairly early (8.20pm ??), and a bit too early for bed.
  The last thing I did while at my PC was to take a screenshot of the weather predicted for today. As you can see, it was far more optimistic that this morning's version of the forecast. It shows sunny spells through to sunset. The very latest revision to the forecast has now extended the sunny spells to 1pm, a one hour improvement on this morning's forecast, but it now add a big full stop by way of a very dark looking cloud for 2pm.

  I spent some time catching up with some technology news (https://www.theregister.com/), and around 9pm I went to bed, but initially to read until I felt tired. At my first yawn, maybe just after 9.30pm, I turned the light out, and prepared for sleep - which took ages to come. I was probably thrashing around for over an hour, maybe even close to 2 hours, before I fell into a very poor sleep.

  One missing piece of information is that my dinner included some sliced green finger chillies - with the seeds left in ! My latest theory is that while the chillies only added a bit of warmth to the stew, those seeds, after being attacked by digestive juices for a few hours, would release a lot of heat. It was probably around 11am, after being asleep for little over an hour, that I woke up feeling boiling hot, but also cold, with a damp sweat soaked pillow, and the top of the duvet feeling damp an clammy. It was back to the old battle of boiling under the duvet, while anything left uncovered felt freezing.

  After a lot of patchy sleep I gave in at 2am and turned the heater on. It took some time to take the worst of the chill off my bedroom. By that time the (presumed) effect of the chilly seeds was just about over, and by 3am I was probably sleeping almost OK. I did my best to have a lay in this morning, and managed to sleep until almost 8am (I only just managed to take a screenshot of the weather forecast before the 8am revision kicked in).

  After my gluttony, munching through three packs of wraps, I was expecting my blood glucose to be well into the danger zone this morning. Maybe I sweated all the sugar out, or something, because I was startled to see another nice low reading of 8.0mmol/l, and a small drop in my running average for the month. There is an alternate reason, not for this morning's low reading, but for the high reading yesterday morning. That reading followed two days of something like, but not constipation. The previous two mornings I had "gone", but the quantity seemed a lot smaller than expected. Yesterday my output, over several sessions, was larger than normal, and presumably everything was back in balance again. It is such oddities as this that doctors only rely on the full blood test, that in effect averages everything out over a couple of months, to get an accurate idea of how well I am controlling my blood glucose.  It is taking years, but I am gradually learning not to be worried about the occasional spike in my readings - provided it is occasional !

  Last night I was thinking I ought to go out and enjoy the sunshine. Now I know, or at least I am lead to believe, that the afternoon is going to be generally dull, I feel less enthusiastic about it. It would still be good to stretch my legs, but on the other hand I have a sick laptop to nurse....