The forecast for today shows lots of sunny spells, but they are (obviously) caused by clear skies, and those clear skies allowed the temperature to plummet last night. One of my outside thermometers was saying -3.6° C a little earlier, and another almost confirmed it (it disagreed by a couple of tenths of a degree). Today's "high" is predicted to be no more than 3° C ! Another clear night means the temperature will plummet again, although the current forecast for tomorrow shows it starting at 0° C, and then more sunny spells may raise it to 5° C.

  Yesterday was an odd day. I did very little, and really only achieved one thing, but it seems I was still too busy to do one thing I was going to do. I have no idea how I achieved that. I don't think I even had time for a snooze.  It seems that somehow I was also busy doing nothing to avoid eating temptations !

  The one concrete thing I did achieve yesterday was to hand wash my medium sized bath towel. I had probably left it too long before washing it, although the last time I used it I only noticed the merest feint hint of it starting to get stale, and then perhaps just in one tiny bit of one of the corners. The big problem of leaving it too long before washing it is one I am conscious of, and try and avoid....but never seem to do !

  The problem appears to be, and may actually be, that every time I have a shower, and think I have completely rinsed myself off, it would seem I manage to leave some residual soap, and the towel mops it up. After soaking the towel in a light dose of detergent, it took at least 8, and maybe 10 rinses before the rinse water was starting to not get very foamy. I actually did the rinses in three shifts with a short break between them, but eventually I hung up the towel to dry on a clothes horse in the dining room. I had the fan heater on low for quite a few hours to help it dry, but during the evening I switched to using a desk fan to blow on the towel. It was dry this morning.

  After my blood glucose level had been slowly creeping up over the previous few morning, I was going to try and reverse the process yesterday. I think that idea soaked into my subconscious, and the guided me through the day, and over rode any other desires. I guess my subconscious has a better idea of how these things work than I do because the plate of oven chips I ate for lunch didn't seem a good choice for what I wanted to do.

  I will admit that I did occasionally snack on some Tesco "Jumbo" peanuts. In my opinion they were no bigger than most peanuts. Maybe they were a little bit bigger than a lot of the peanuts that are available after Brexit, and they were much lighter in colour. They are softer too. "Ordinary" peanuts tend to be dark, as if over roasted, and maybe have been in long term storage for ages. Tesco "Stockwell" own branded peanuts have been closer in quality to those used for bird feed for a year or more now.

  It's hard to remember just what I did all day yesterday. It's mainly because I can't believe the bits I can remember add up to a whole day that passed so easily. One thing was to start a new book. It is "The Postman" by David Brin - another post apocalypse Sci Fi story. All I had managed to read before the end of the day was the few chapters that laid out the setting for the story. I also read some news and other stuff on the internet, but it just doesn't feel like it filled a whole day. Maybe the one thing I am forgetting is that I started late yesterday, and it was then late when I finished writing this diary. That would have accounted for an hour or two.

  At about 5pm I turned on the TV, and watched an episode of Warehouse 13. During the last commercial break I added the final ingredients to my dinner, and zapped it in the microwave. The next bit of TV was Star Trek: The Next Generation. During the first commercial break in that I retrieved my dinner from the microwave. It was two skinless/boneless chicken breasts with some runner beans and a lot of white cabbage. I originally was only going to have one chicken breast. The intention was to fish the second one out to store for today, but they seems to shrink a lot while cooking, and I ate both.

  After Star Trek there was The Simpsons. After that there was a long break before the second or two episodes of QI was shown on Dave. The first episode being shown had Johnny Vegas as a guest, and I thought sticking pins in my eyeball would be more pleasant, but actually I resorted to reading until that second, and enjoyable episode was shown. Finally, that was followed by Have I Got News For You. It was a "best of" 2018 episode. It was odd that despite feeling I couldn't be bothered to stay up until 10pm all that often, the time when Have I Got News For You tends to be shown, I seemed to know every minutes of the show.

  For me, TV finished at 11pm, and I went straight to bed. The only problem was that I didn't seem to feel sleepy, and as seems almost normal these days, I couldn't seem to find that special comfortable position that allows me to relax. Sometime I think I might have too many arms because it is trying to tuck both of them into comfortable positions that is the trouble.  Evidently I did find the magical position, and at about midnight (at least I think it was probably midnight) I did fall asleep.

  Once I had fallen asleep I had no real problems for the rest of the night. Several time when I got up for a pee I checked my outdoor (wireless linked) thermometers, and seeing the temperature gradually fall to minus 3, or nearly -4° C probably kept me awake for a few extra minutes, but even this morning I was still finding it easy to get to sleep again. At about 4am I turned the heater of full blast, and so my bedroom was warm, but not hot, when I eventually decided to get up at gone 7am.

  This morning I was happy to see that my blood glucose had dropped to just 7.8mmol/l. That is very close to my imagined ideal of 7.5mmol/l - a figure I very rarely attain these days. Less good is that a visit to the toilet produced nothing but gas. I was hoping that a good dump would make the scales show a tiny bit of weight loss, but my weight still keeps to about the same figure - plus or minus a few hundred grammes.

  It is my considered opinion that it is too cold to "play" outside today, although I may go to Poundstretcher to buy some sugar free fizzy drinks (probably just Irn Bru), and maybe other stuff that I notice. The one thing I won't do today is to have a shower. In this cold I know the bath waste pipe will freeze up like it did the last time (sometime in December). Today I'll just flick a wet flannel over the smelliest bits, and reserve filling up the bathtub with soapy water until tomorrow when I will want a proper wash for when I (hopefully) see Angela in the pub at lunchtime. It is just possible that tomorrow may not be quite cold enough for the water to freeze in the bath drain pipe.

  Once again I almost forgot to show two pictures taken yesterday at around sunset. The first, taken at sunset shows a lot of red. The second taken just 15 minutes later shows a thick bank of black looking cloud on the western horizon.