Today is going to feel rather cold with no supporting sunshine. It was close to 8° C at 7am, and the afternoon high may only be 10° C. In the latest revision to the forecast the single hour of sunny spells at 9am has been replaced by light cloud. It should be light cloud as I write this, but it looks really dull outside. The day is forecast to be dry, but I am not sure I trust those dark grey clouds midday and 5pm (as per the latest revision). Overall it looks to be a nasty day. Tomorrow may be no warmer, and it is likely to be a wet morning, and wet in the late afternoon. For a few hours between 10am and 1pm it may be sunny. I am predicting that the forecast for tomorrow, tomorrow morning, will be nothing like the current forecast for tomorrow !

  Yesterday was sort of entertaining in a twisted sort of way. I seemed to spend most of the day playing with the laptop that Alan, Jodie's boyfriend, gave me. I can quite see how he wanted to off load it's problems on someone else. I spent hour after hour on it, and by last night I thought I might have got it into a stable condition - I was wrong !

  The major symptom of the problem is that it was difficult to get it to start up. It seemed better with the battery taken out, and then would often start when the charger/power plug was plugged in. There was a further clue as to what was wrong when it would report the BIOS real time clock had lost it's setting if the device was left unpowered for a while. After playing for an hour or more I decided to check the back up battery.

  I must say Dell make it very easy to get to the backup battery and things like the memory modules. Just 5 screws to take out, and the back plate just slides off - very simple once you have done it for the first time. The backup battery is in plain sight with the back off, and it is a 3V lithium "coin" sized battery with flying lead that plug in to the motherboard. I tested it, and instead of 3V it measured just 0.39V. I thought I had diagnosed the main problem.

  It turns out that I didn't, although I only got a real confirmation of that this morning. Making a replacement battery pack was a bit of a bodge. The original coin cell had tags welded to it that the wires were soldered to. It is not a good idea to try to solder to lithium, or indeed any batteries. I ripped off the metal tag from the old cell, and relied on heat shrink sleeving to keep them pressed against the new battery.

  The new battery did seem to help, and I was able to install MX linux on a new hard disk I had put in. Once I had managed to boot it up, usually by getting it to start when plugging in the power (and with the battery removed), it worked perfectly. I spent another hour or so customising the xfce desktop, and installing some of my favourite programs.

  It was after I had done most of my customisations, and shut the laptop down that I made a strange discovery - it was easy to start the laptop up by closing the screen. Usually it works the other way around - shutting the screen shots the laptop down, or puts it into hibernation if set up that way. Evidently I had to leave it open when I finished with it for the day. That was no problem last night, but a bit tricky if, for instance, I wanted to take the laptop out, to a pub maybe.

  I want to say I didn't eat much yesterday, but if I include several chunks of cheese I used as nibbling material, it probably wasn't all that little. My breakfast was the now usual bowl of instant noodles. Lunch was 4 rice cakes with garlic sausage on them. That seemed a good idea at the time, but maybe garlic sausage didn't really work on rice cakes. My dinner was very simple - 6 well grilled Cumberland sausages.

  I was still nipping downstairs to try stuff on the laptop during commercial breaks between the TV programmes I usually watch in the early evening. I ended up missing chunks of those programmes when I got carried away on the laptop. I finally shut everything down downstairs, including the laptop, and I was thinking of heading for bed before 9pm, but I didn't seem to feel that tired. I ended up watching the 9pm QI on Dave, followed by an episode of Have I Got News For You.

   That latter programme finished at 11pm, and then I went to bed. I read in bed for maybe half an hour before I began to feel very sleepy. This time it worked, and 10 minutes after turning out the light I was fast asleep. As far as I can remember, I slept rather well last night. I think the longest time I was awake was around 4am. I had got up for a pee, and turned the heater on before going back to bed. I was actually feeling a little bit cold in bed at that time of the morning - which makes a change !

  I would imagine that the heater had barely warmed the room up by half a degree before I no longer felt cool in bed - and it was only slightly cool, and then only if I left a hand or something uncovered by the duvet. By 6am my bedroom was just warm enough to push the duvet slightly aside. I didn't think I was sleeping much from then on, but it must have been a deep enough sleep to not realise a whole hour had passed.

  I got up very soon after 7am this morning, and because I had slept that last hour half uncovered, my morning temperature was just 34.7° C - which seems very typical after sleeping uncovered, even in high summer.  I'm not saying it is a good or bad thing. It just is what it is. What was pleasingly low was my blood glucose. This morning it was just 7.8mmol/l, and my running average dropped back enough to give a well below average if I can keep these low readings up until the end of the month.

  My plans for today are very simple - even simpler than I first thought ! Today a memoriam service is being held for Liz Vass (singer in her own bands, and one time frequent backing/harmony vocals for Chain). That is in a church in Petts Wood at 11am. I am not too interested in that, but I do want to go to The Daylight Inn where a little musical celebration is taking place from 1pm. I am assuming it will be a sort of open mic session featuring those who have played with Liz over the years.