Today will be the 3rd or 4th (or more ?) cold and dull days. If the forecast holds it will be a very grey day, and today looks to be the coldest in this run of dull days. Just 5° C is forecast - just 1° higher than the cold 4° C start, and end of the day. There is a 10% chance of rain at any time today. That makes rain possible, but unlikely. Tomorrow sees a small change for the better. Most of the day is forecast to have white, instead of grey cloud, and the afternoon temperature could reach a very slightly less cool 8° C.  After that things could get worse. There is a 70% chance of light snow at 6am on Tuesday morning !
 
   Some bits of yesterday were good, other bits less so. Quite a lot of the afternoon was simultaneously good and bad ! The best bit of the day was when I went to Tesco. It was probably because I had a specific goal that the walk there, and back, plus being inside the store, felt good, although maybe that is good in relative terms, rather than fully good.

  I ached a lot yesterday. It almost felt like 'flu or something, although the aches weren't widespread enough for that. Mostly it was my right shoulder, right elbow, plus the bits in between, and below, but I also had some upper chest pain that seemed to be linked to lower back pain. Those latter pains were very posture related. The arm pains, because my left arm also had a few twinges, were probably arthritis/rheumatism or other weather related maladies.

  I can't seem to remember any real pains as I walked to Tesco. If anything it felt good, and seemed at odds to what I expected on a cold and very grey day. I suspect it was because there was a real reason for going out in the cold and grey, and not going out for any specific reason or destination. Going home from Tesco I had the very much added cheer of bright sunshine, and it lasted all the way home before the sun was switched off for the rest of the day.

  I was very careful about what I bought in Tesco - much more so than when I claim to have been almost careful. I didn't buy anything contentious, or anything I felt I had to eat as soon as I got home. The one thing I did eat when I got home was only partly safe. It was melted cheese on Polish sourdough toast. The bread was still fairly fresh, and so toasting it didn't turn out to make it seem like crispbread - which is how the last slices of the previous loaf came out.

  A couple of hours later I had a snack of three of the pea and lentil, beetroot flavoured, veggie bakes with cheese on them. I don't think I can rave about those Kallo beetroot veggie cakes like I did when I first reported on them a couple of weeks ago, but they are still very nice for an occasional snack. I ate them during a long job I did in the afternoon.

  That long job came about in a non obvious way. It started with a desire for a bit of time wasting digitising of an old VHS tape or two. To do that I needed a bit of space near my PC, and to get that space I needed to find some bookshelf space to put a pile of book on it. I realised I had some bookshelf space, but it was very cluttered with all sorts of junk - including a stack of CD-R and DVD-R (and DVD+R) disks. They mostly had sound recordings on that I was intending to transfer to backup external hard disks.
  Here's my Edmund Cooper books on the new (old, but decluttered) bookshelf. Note the two blue glass Haig whisky bottles being used as bookends. I am not sure if I have ever thrown away any of those nice blue glass bottles. I had fanciful ideas of using them for a blue glass wall in the garden, and maybe that will happen some day in the indefinite future. For the time being, two of the bottles are now in uses as bookends.

  When it came to considering the CDs and DVDs I decided I might as well start copying them over to external, USB, back up hard disks. There was a lot more disks than I thought there were because many were not in cases. A lot, probably most of them, contain old pirate radio programmes - including a lot of my own studio recordings. Some of my early radio shows were very cringeworthy, but the last one's I recorded did seem to sound good, but I declined to listen to any more than the odd few minutes here and there.

  Once I was into the swing of copying the optical disks to hard disk it went smoothly, although it is not a fast process. It was both boring and interesting at the same time. I think I got through maybe a third of the disks yesterday, and after making sure there were two hard disk copies, I threw away the optical disks. I don't know how many hours passed as I did this job, but it kept me "amused" until about 5pm.

  It was about 5pm when I turned on the TV and found there was bugger on all night. I switched the TV off and resumed watching series 8, the final series of Futurama. Most of series 8 I had never watched before, although I did remember seeing the very final episode. I can't remember if I actually saw it on TV, or whether I watched it from the DVDs that I had ripped all the episodes from. It had a weird, but happy ending.

  During watching Futurama I had a mostly safe dinner. It was chicken stew with a heap of savoy cabbage, and also some sugarsnap peas. I had some worries about those sugarsnap peas - do they really have any significant sugar in them ? This morning I think that maybe they do.

  After the final Futurama episode I went to bed to read, and read for quite a while in order to finish the book I was reading (an anthology of old SciFi short stories). I have no idea what time I finished reading, and what time I turned out the light. What I do know is that I gave myself a better chance of sleep by taking a couple of paracetamol tablets to calm all the aches and pains.

  Those tablets did do the trick, and I slept better than recently. I didn't even get up for a pee as many times as most nights. Maybe it was because I drank no beer last night, and only had maybe one large whisky, or maybe it was because my blood glucose was not high last night. In fact the latter was not the case.

  This morning I found my blood glucose was higher than expected. It was up to 8.8mmol/l, and I think the only thing I can blame is those sugar snap peas. I must check the nutritional content on the packet, although most green vegetables don't include any nutritional info, or at least green leaf vegetables don't need to......Curiosity got the better of me, and I have just been down to the kitchen to check the packet. It seems 75mg of sugar snap peas, or half the 150mg packet, contains 2.8mg of sugar. That is not a lot, but maybe it was too much. I think I will omit them from tonight's dinner, but I'll have to use them up the next day or so.

  There are two things I am likely to do today. One is to go to Savers, and perhaps to Poundstretcher afterwards. I need to get vitamins and stuff from Savers, and I can always find stuff I think I want from Poundstretcher. The second job is to continue copying files from all the recordable optical disks to backup hard disks. It is one of those jobs that can seem boring until you "get into the groove", and then you can just go into automaton mode....or something. It will help pass the day, and will be another tiny, teeny bit of the endless desire to get my house as tidy as possible....one day.