The stand out thing about today's forecast is that it will be a constant 7° C the whole day. Under those grey skies it is going to feel very wintry. In the latest revision the mist shown for 8am above has been moved to 9am to give 2 consecutive hours of mist. Apart from still being very grey, because sunrise is still 15 minutes away, the air seems very clear. I have doubts about that mist forming. Tomorrow could be 2° C warmer with the temperature reaching 9° C for a few hours, but the morning will be dark grey. The afternoon may only be light grey. Looking further ahead, Sunday looks "interesting". In the unlikely event the forecast so many days in advance has any credibility, it will be just 4° C during a rainy morning. A drop of even a degree could bring sleety snow !

   My day was busier than expected yesterday. I made slow progress in the morning, but eventually washed a small bath towel, and a couple of face flannels that had gone stinky. What I didn't do was to have a shower. There just didn't seem to be time for that. With a damp flannel and a spray of deodorant, I would probably have not been offensive if Jodie had come over in the afternoon as was expecting.
  This picture is not easy to visualise without a clue. It is a pair of (genuine) Marigold rubber gloves, and what I am showing is a small hole appearing on the base of the thumb where it joins the rest of the glove. It is fairly common to wear out gloves in this way. Wringing out heavy stuff like a bath towel, which is also sort of rough, eventually causes a tiny tear in the rubber, and with more use that tiny tear can end up as a big rip. On some cheap rubber gloves I have had the whole glove rip in two when taking it off after this has happened. That pair of gloves has now gone to the knackers yard, and I think the next pair I will use are Aldi "Power Force" gloves. Like Marigolds, they are more resilient than many other makes. Poundshop, and similar gloves can sometimes barely survive a couple of washed before they start to leak.

  With the laundry done I next tackled the washing up. There wasn't a lot in the sink, but there were a lot of beer glasses to wash. Fortunately those glasses had all been rinsed before being left near the sink, and didn't need any detergent to clean them. I think the job took less time than expected, but I did take a little extra time to prepare my dinner for it's first spell in the microwave.

  With the laundry, and washing up done, the next thing I should have done was to have a shower, but as I noted above I just used a wet flannel, deodorant, and fresh clothes for when I expected to entertain Jodie. The problem was that she had not read the bottom of the last message I had sent her on Saturday. The message was to say I would not be around on Sunday because I was going to Brian Bath's birthday party gig. At the bottom I suggested maybe we could postpone our beer tasting session until Monday.

  While I was waiting for Jodie I continued to select and edit photos taken on Sunday afternoon and early evening. The final tally was I had taken 261 snaps in total. Some of them were never intended to be anything more than test shots, although I did end up using a few of them. There were also some duplicates where I had the shutter on multi burst. A few were spoiled by the flash not firing, and a few were just slightly different angles on the same subject.

  In total I selected 38 photos for my photo album, and that means I used 14.5% of all the photos I took. That is better than the 10% that became a rough average in later years of photography, and maybe as little as 5% in earlier years. There have been some exceptions to this. A year or two ago I was at a very crowded gig, and I can't stand heavy crowds. I shot off about 14 snaps in the space of 5 minutes, and then went home. A few needed a bit of careful editing, but I used 12 of them for a photo album - and those dozen actually looked quite good.

   I don't think I really expected it, but it does seem I am getting better shots out of my new camera than previous cameras. It was good having the Liz Vass memorial gig a fortnight ago as a sort of rehearsal for using the new camera. Anyway, I waited and waited to hear from Jodie. I the end I sent her a message, and she said she didn't see that I had suggested she come over yesterday afternoon. She did suggest that she come over today. It gave me loads of time in my "digital darkroom", and by maybe 6 or 7pm I had selected and edited every photo I would include in my photo album.
  I think this picture of Angela and her son Larry might have won me some "brownie points", although that was not the intention. It just looked a good pose, and had to be snapped.
  Here's Miranda with a very enigmatic smile on her face as she gets ready to play guitar. I'm not sure if this was the first time she had picked up her guitar. Earlier on she said not to expect too much guitar playing because after several years of not playing her fingertips had gone soft, and the strings were causing a lot of discomfort.
  On the left, with white guitar, is Barry Sherlock. As far as I am aware I had never seen him before. He is obviously quite elderly, but he still plays a keen guitar, and sings well. Evidently he has played with Brian many times before. The two played really well together.
  Before the encore Brian did his best to round up everybody for a group photo. I wish I had a wider angle lens for this because I could only stand about 10ft away without actually standing on the drums. On a warm and dry summers day they could have all stood outside the pub where there was more room to move, but this snap got most people in it, and somehow Brian managed to be right in the centre.
  A few more managed to cram in on the left of the picture - including Angela who is waving. Lover boy appears in both photos, and he is trying to smile, but I don't think his face lets him.

  It was a long process going through the pictures, but while I was very glad to get it all over and done with, it was enjoyable. A tangible memory of a great afternoon and evening. If I haven't said it before, it was like being with family. I mentioned that idea to Miranda when she contacted me to say Brian had found the eyecup from my camera when clearing up later. Miranda agreed, and said it was just like being in a happy family. I am not sure what my place is in the family, and even less sure when Angela marries lover boy.

  During the day I had eaten 4 of the not very low sugar wholemeal rolls. They were sort of filling, and I felt less need to do any snacking, although I did have some new cheese that I cut off a lump because I was curious about what it was like. It was "Firecracker Red Leicestershire" which had chillies in it. That is now common for Cheddar, and maybe Cheedar suits it a bit more, but it was still nice.

  My dinner was specially "formulated" to be low sugar to counteract the bread rolls I had for breakfast and lunch. It was a very simple dinner of diced beef with a lot of broccoli made as a sort of stew. I think the diced beef had either jumped a few fences, or could have done with a fair bit more cooking to tenderise it, but it was still a nice meal. Being a Monday night I ate it while watching my usual weekday TV programmes.

  The last thing I saw was the 7.40pm showing of a QI repeat on Dave. I noted that there was no showing at 9pm like there used to be. It was only about 8.10pm when that first, and only, QI finished, and I brushed my teeth and went to bed then. I didn't intend to go to sleep quite that early. I had taken almost no time to read anything from my current book during the day, and I took the opportunity to read until gone 9pm.

  I then thought I felt tired enough to go to sleep. I turned off the light, turned over, and nothing happened. It seemed like I was being cursed with insomnia, but while it felt like I was trying to get to sleep for ages, I suspect it was barely more than 20 minutes. The next thing I knew was that over three hours had passed. I seemed to sleep rather well in the end - so good that getting up at 6.10am seemed to feel about right.

  I do remember some hazy bits of a couple of dreams. In one I think I was telling someone about the realities of work as, and with other engineers. Engineers can have a certain mind set, and I was saying that on the whole, whenever some manager, who had little knowledge of what we actually did, came up with some stupid idea (which I described as a brain fart) we would pay him lip service, but basically ignore him because our work was dictated by physics, and not some sort of magic.

  Another bit of dream featured a slightly mad (or maddened !) engineer. I didn't recognise the place he worked, and I am not even sure if I was just watching a tale unfold like watching a TV programme. Once again it involved a foolish boss. This engineer found a way of injecting a small bit of petrol into the exhaust system, and so every time the boss started his car there would be an almighty backfire as if the car was exploding.

  I did have one short period of insomnia after this dream when I considered how he could have gotten the petrol into the exhaust system. One possibility, and one that could probably done for real as a prank, was to put a bit of rogue software into the computerised engine management system. I reckon if you delayed the spark from the spark plugs until the engine had turned over a couple of times, enough unburnt petrol would end up in the exhaust system for a good backfire.

  This morning I sort of feel OK. I still feel rather lazy, or maybe that is because I know I have very little to do today to get ready for a beer tasting session this afternoon. This time I will have a good shower before Jodie arrives ! The best news, is that my blood glucose has returned to normal after my excursion into the danger zone yesterday morning. It was 8.8mmol/l this morning. That is a little above average, but any reading starting with an 8 is good enough.

  I expect my blood glucose reading will be high again tomorrow, but hopefully still under 10.0mmol/l. Tonight, particularly after drinking lots of lovely beer, I think I have to use up a couple of unfrozen ready meals I bought from Tesco last Friday (?). I did select both to have a lower sugar content than most of the ready meals, but a bit lower is not the same as "low".