It is bright and sunny now, and the latest revision to the forecast has extended the sunny spells beyond 2pm (as shown in the earlier version above) all the way until sunset. The afternoon temperature is still shown as 6° C, and that is an improvement over yesterday, but only a couple of degrees extra. I was surprised to see a frost this morning. I noted that at midnight, last night, the temperature was still a few tenths of a degree above zero, and at 8am this morning is seemed to be plus 1° C. I assume it dipped below zero in the earlier hours of this morning. It seems it will still be 3° C at 11pm tonight. In terms of sunshine, tomorrow may be very similar to today. The lowest temperature tomorrow may be 0° C at 8am, and the highest will be 6° C at 2pm. Like today, tomorrow should be dry.
 
   Yesterday was a generally good day, although it did involve some excess, and unneeded eating. Another negative was that I found that the last book that was delivered the day before yesterday was one I already had, but published under a different title. That was a bit annoying because it was the most expensive of the books I had ordered recently. It is classified as a rare book - which is sort of good, but I am really only interested in the text, and not the cover - although some book covers can be interesting.

  The first good thing about yesterday was that the temperature outside had risen to maybe 2° C by the time I had a shower, and I had no problem with the bath waste pipe being frozen, and the water drained away as I showered - as it should do. Once I was clean and hopefully fragrant, and also dressed, I set forth into the great outdoors to walk to Tesco to get some shopping.

  I wrapped up nice and warm, and wore gloves to walk to Tesco, and it sort of felt OK. Of course it would have been far, far better if I had been able to walk without a coat, with warm sunshine on my arms, but that will come.....eventually. Top of my shopping list was some meat for my next few dinners. I bought both diced beef and lamb. Yesterday I used half the diced beef to make my dinner.

  Once again, to my complete shame, I was suckered in to buy two useless items because they were on the reduced price shelf. One was a pack of 6 miniature pork and pickle pies, and the other was a pack of 2 cheese and onion slices. I also bought quite a few items that had Clubcard discounts, although I don't think I chose any of them because of that discount. It was still handy to have.

  After another semi pleasant walk back home in the weak sunshine, I put my shopping away, and then chomped my way through the 6 miniature pork and pickle pies. It was not exactly a great lunch, but I guess it was tasty or I might have stopped after a couple, and treated them as a snack. The real problem came almost 2 hours later when I decided to eat the pack of two cheese and onion slices because they would line my stomach before boozing. "Lining the stomach" is apparently a myth, but I didn't seem to feel drunk at the end of the boozing session.

  Both Jodie and Michael turned up within 5 minutes of each other. The first thing Jodie did was to start preparing her lunch in the kitchen. That left me and Michael gasping for a drink, and so we started without her. Michael had brought a few lagers, as usual because he is less keen on some of the awful beers that Jodie likes than I am. He had one of his lagers, but I can't remember what I had. I keep thinking it was a 11% Trappist beer, but I am sure I had that later.

  It was probably 15 minutes before Jodie joined us, and even then she had to prompted to hurry up and choose a beer from the fridge, even if she wasn't going to drink it straight away. It turned out that Jodie was not in much of a drinking mood. I think she still might have had a hangover from the previous day's drinking. We did finally get through maybe 5 cans of beer, although each one was split three ways so we could all taste it.

  I slipped in a few cans purely for myself, and Michael did the same with the lager he had brought along with him. There was a fair bit of good banter with Michael, but as often happens, he ended up almost ranting. His chief rant is that we are missing out on so much new music because we continue to love the old music we love, although the last part of that argument is just me making a conclusion from what he was saying. he would make an excellent salesman for the internet music source called Spotify - except he would probably end up making other hate it in his over enthusiasm.

  Wikipedia has more to say about Spotify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify It includes a whole section about negative things about the service. What it doesn't attempt to explain is one reason why I don't ever feel like trying the service. I am told that it looks at music you like, and then tries to offer new stuff that it thinks you will also like. The trouble with that is it take no account of why you like some songs. It is definitely the case that I like some music based upon a single line of the lyrics, and I would definitely not are for anything else on the same album, or similar stuff recommended by Spotify. Besides all that, I don't have the same ravenous taste for new music that Michael has. When I listen to his rants I can imagine he is saying he doesn't like all the old stuff he claims to like !

  Yesterday was unusual in that Jodie left first. She wanted to get the 6:13 train to Clockhouse where she would be meeting her boyfriend. Michael left 5 minutes after Jodie. Once they were gone I added the last ingredients to my dinner, and put in the microwave for the final time for 15 minutes of zapping. I was a beef stew with mushrooms, a bell pepper and loads of white cabbage. It was not as good as the lamb stew I had the night before, but still pretty tasty. It was theoretically filling enough to not need the blue cheese I ate soon after as a sort of dessert.

  I think both QI episodes shown last night (one was a QIXL) met with my approval, and I watched both, plus Have I Got More News For You that followed. It meant that once again I didn't go to bed until 11pm. I don't think I did any reading in bed last night, and went straight to trying to get to sleep. I seemed to have less trouble getting to sleep last night, although it was still not the ideal fast asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. That does happen, but very rarely. I think I did manage to fall asleep before midnight. My last memory is noting that the outside temperature was still just above zero.

  From then on I did seem to sleep quite well. I seemed like I only got up to pee a few times - less than normal, although to be honest I don't remember too much about the night. I know I had some dreams, and I think I recall one involved being in a pub, but I can't be sure that is a fact, and anything else is just a hazy blur. As usual I started sleeping more lightly after about 6am. Once again I did that thing where I decided to have "just another 5 minutes in bed". Once again that 5 minutes turned out to be closer to 90 minutes, but this morning it really did feel that someone had wound the clock on while my eyes were closed. It was literally like all that time passed during a single blink.

  I thought all my naughty eating, in particular my extended lunch, plus the usual fears that some of beers might contain a lot of sugar, would lead to my blood glucose getting very high this morning, but it seems not. It was just a tiny bit higher than yesterday, but 8.5mmol/l is so close to my typical average it is not worth dwelling on. I fear I would not be so lucky if I dared weigh myself. Like yesterday, I have not gone to the toilet yet. I did go yesterday, straight after I finished writing, and went again just before I had my shower. I did dare to weigh myself then, and once again it was with a percent or so of my typical weight.

  I think it will not be until I start some walking exercise that I will actually make a small, but useful dip in my weight. On this bright and sunny, but very cold morning, I have been thinking about going out to do something.... I have considered an adventure on the trains, armed with my favourite camera, or maybe an actual bit of walking exercise - also with a camera even if there is not a lot to see in the park at this time of year. As yet I have made no decision, and I won't until I have gone to the toilet at least once, and probably twice. Maybe that is close to happening, and it will happen, like yesterday, once I have upload this to my web server.