This morning sees a return to a frosty start, and also fog, or thick mist. It seemed clear when I peeped outside at around 8am, and I was most surprised to see the forecast for fog held true when I opened the curtains at 9am. The latest revision to the forecast has added fog for 10am. The sun, when it eventually breaks through, should look very nice, but it will only warm up outdoors to just 7° C this afternoon. It is going to be another very cold night, and tomorrow morning will start at 0° C. No mist or fog is predicted for tomorrow morning, and from sunrise to sunset there should be non stop sunshine, but like today we will be lucky to see anything higher than 7° C.
 
   Yesterday was one of those days that was rather different to any intended thoughts or plans. In some ways it was an experimental day, and those experiments were usefully productive. The only real work I did was to hand wash two t-shirts. One was a white t-shirt, and couldn't be mixed with black t-shirts, but it seemed to be OK to wash it with a well washed light blue t-shirt. The only danger is that the light blue t-shirt could have picked up some black dye when being washed with black t-shirts. Fortunately it seemed to come out nice and white - even the beer stain seems to have gone...I think !

  The thing which occupied a lot of my time yesterday was my new blood pressure meter. I spent something like a whole hour just scanning the instruction sheet in high resolution (lower resolution would have been quicker). There were 20 small (A7 sized ?) panels on the instruction and info leaflet, and I scanned each one as a separate high resolution jpeg image file. With that finally done I could actually read what the tiny 2pt instructions were.

  I guess the meter was built down to a price, but I am sure another couple of push buttons couldn't have affected the price too much, and they would certainly make entering date a lot easier.  Setting the time and date just using one single button is very cleaver, but also very stupid in the real world. Apart from getting the date out by one day - something I will correct at my leisure - I got all the date and time data in, and there was nothing else to do but test it again.

  On the day it arrived I gave a quick test, and it failed every time. I wondered if it was because I hadn't set the date and time, but it turned out that wasn't the case. Fortunately I had the volume down on my music player when I was trying it yesterday and the problem was plainly audible. There was an air leak roughly in the area where the hose from the meter connects to the bladder in the cuff.

  It was at this point I did a lot of experimentation. The obvious thing to try was the cuff from my old (possibly over 6 years old) Omron blood pressure meter. Unfortunately they use different size hoses, and the fit was so loose that it would leak like a sieve unless I held it firmly in place, but it did prove the new meter could pump it up enough to take a reading. I next used some twine wrapped tightly around the hose to make it a snug fit. I then managed to get a high, but believable blood pressure reading.
  The next thing I tried was the "single patient" cuff that I got while in Kings College Hospital back in 2019. It was put on my arm soon after I arrived there, and left on when I left. I decided I would keep it as a sort of souvenir or something. The problem with it is that it is not designed for easy use one handed. In normal use it would be put on by a nurse. I found the only way to use it was to stick the velcro fastening to what seemed to be aboit the right place, and then slide it up my arm as far as it would go - which is probably about half an inch short of the optimum placement.

  Since then I have been able to get fairly sane looking readings, but they always seem to be higher than using the old machine. I am hoping it is not that the old machine was wrong, but it is that single patient cuff on the new machine that is just not ideally placed. I know that the proper thing would be to send the new machine back as faulty, but the path of least resistance was to order a new cuff. Unfortunately I could not find one for my machine, but Amazon did offer a sort of universal fitting one.

   I then had to pay extra for next day delivery because that was the only option without signing up for Amazon Prime. It should be here later, possibly much later today. Until then I can still use my old machine by giving it some hard thumps before use. My latest theory is that it is the pressure release valve sticking, and it loses air when stuck. It could be a simple repair if it is the thing I think it is, and if it were possible to get a replacement.

  At about 1pm I had a snack lunch of 4 rice cakes with cheese on them. It got to about 5pm and I suddenly realised I hadn't prepared any dinner for the evening. In theory I had plenty of time to do it, but I suddenly had in mind the idea of ordering a shish kebab for dinner (plus a spare for today as well). I waited until just gone 6pm before I ordered. Maybe by then I was feeling very hungry because I gave in to a stupid idea - a portion of chips and some grilled wings as extras.

  The great flaw in my plan was the shop they came from is an ex-chip shop, and they do still sell fish and chips. The portion of chips that turned up was HUGE, and knowing that it is impossible to reheat chips to be as good as fresh, I decided I would make the chips, followed by the grilled wings, my dinner last night. I will admit it was a very pleasant dinner, but hardly healthy, and I dreaded checking my blood glucose this morning. The wings were not charcoal grilled as advertised, unless that was only part of the process. Maybe they were just very heavily basted with herb flavoured oil as they were grilled. They were most certainly dripping with oil, and part nice and part not nice.

  I'm not sure why, but I was a glutton for TV last night. I watched both QIs, and Have I Got News For You, and didn't head for bed until 11pm. I then read in bed for at least half an hour before putting down the now finished book, turning out the light, and after maybe 15 minutes, falling asleep. On the whole I seemed to sleep OK. I seemed to get up less often to pee - which surprised me after eating that heap of chips. At about 3.30am I realised the outside temperature was close to zero, and my bedroom was getting cool. I turned the heater up full, and went back to sleep.

  After seeming to get to bed so late last night I very deliberately took my time getting up, although I think it was still before 7.30am. It was with great trepidation that I checked my blood glucose. To my astonishment it was exactly the same as yesterday, 8.6mmol/l. That's a perfectly good reading, but I would have liked it lower because I would like to get an extra low average at the end of the month. Of course that is all wishful thinking.

  One thing which I should have added earlier in this narrative is that I finally found out why Angela couldn't get to the pub last week. It seems that last Tuesday she had another, and worse fall. As well as a gash she has several fractures. I still don't know any more details beyond that fact she is still in hospital - presumably Lewisham Hospital. I have sent her a couple of message via different routes, and I know she has seen one, but she hasn't replied with any details.

  My main plan for today is to get some shopping from Tesco. Once again it should be a bright sunny day once the fog lifts If I could believe the forecast that will be in 20 minutes, but if anything the fog is getting thicker. Even when the sun eventually comes out I think it will be too cold to lure me out for anything more than shopping. It could be a boring day, or maybe it won't.