This morning has certainly started sunny, but the cloud does appear to be almost covering the whole sky now, and maybe we are about to lose the sunshine for the rest of the day. On the other hand, looking to the north, away from the glare of the sun, the clouds do look quite thin, and I can see lots of ale blue areas. Maybe we'll have sunny spells, or intervals, for longer than the forecast predicts. The best thing is that the afternoon temperature could each 13° C. With a bit of sunshine that could feel very nice. Sadly it looks as if it will all come to a wet end starting around 6pm. Tomorrow could start as high as 12° C, and rise to 14° C. There could be some sunny spells at the same time as the highest temperature, and compared to what we have been enduring that could feel hot ! Once again, tomorrow evening could see some light rain.
 
   I think I could best describe yesterday as annoying. It was set to be a miserable day, but all the unexpected sunshine was so cheering. If I had known that the middle of the day was going to be sunny, and slightly warm (or as warm as 10° C can be), the day could have been very different, but I played it safe, and kept myself warm - which was easy to do with glorious sunshine pouring through my bedroom windows.

  There were still two things I predicted I might do yesterday, and I guess I did half of each. One was to do some light housework. I didn't end up doing any light housework, but I did do some semi heavy laundry by hand. The underpants, and single t-shirt were easy going, but the thick lounge/sweat pants were quite a handful every time I needed to wring them out - particularly the very last wringing out before I hung them up to dry on the clothes horse in the dining room.

  The other project was to see if I could transfer video via firewire from one of my DV camcorders to my new laptop. The laptop does have a firewire (IEE1394) port, but I don't know if it is connected inside, or whether Linux detected it, and installed the Linux equivalent of drivers for it. What I do know is that my usual Linux video editor, Kdenlive, dropped support for it because it was considered obsolete, and no one was looking after the software for connecting to a DV camcorder so that the camcorder could be controlled, and imported into the editor.

  The important thing here is that just because Kdenlive no longer works with DV camcorders, it doesn't mean that nothing else does. I have hopes that OBS, primarily targeted at things like web cams, but very, very versatile, may be able to extract the video from the firewire data stream, even if it can't control the camcorder (but the camcorder has it's own controls for that). Obviously the first thing is to grab a DV camcorder.

  I do have a very posh, "pro-sumer" (a cross between professional and consumer) Sony DV camcorder, and it is a wonderful piece of equipment, but I can't mains power it - I have to run it on batteries. It is also quite big. My two Samsung DV camcorders are a lot smaller, and one is tiny by comparison. I dug out the bigger of the Samsung camcorders, and decided it would be a good idea to charge the batteries while it was out (Lithium batteries can die if left to discharge too deeply).

  I thought I would start my experiments with the tiny Samsung DV camcorder, but at first I couldn't find it. It was not the first place I expected to find it, nor the second possible place. I eventually found it tucked away in the still unsorted stuff in the dining room. That too had two batteries, and I decided to charge them before doing any more. That is as far as I got in the project, except for looking through my DV camcorder tapes note book to see what might be worth copying to a PC.

   In fact there is very little that I haven't already copied and edited, and anything I have not yet done may only be a few minutes long, or so fragmented that making something that might be worth watching was pretty slim. I did find one tape that might have had something interesting on it, but that was the only other thing I did for the whole project yesterday. The silly thing is that in one sense all three DV camcorders are indeed obsolete. None do proper Widescreen (although the big Sony sort of does it by cropping and then expanding the image), and none do high definition - both things that are standard on mobile phones, and for many scenes are much higher definition.

  The rest of my day could be described as boring. I did eat a few bad things like a couple of steak slices, and a peppered salami sandwich. Later on I had a very bad thing - part two of my Indian takeaway. That was a delicious lamb Vindaloo served on a bed of mushroom rice. I don't recall ordering the mushroom rice, and indeed it does not appear on the order confirmation. I suspect it might have been meant for another order. I have never tried mushroom rice before, as far as I can remember. It was rather good.

  There were very slim pickings on TV last night. The only thing I watched, and even than some of the time I just listened, was a documentary about the 2020 Genesis reunion "Domino" tour. I was curious to see that Phil Collins was sitting down through most nearly all the gig, and documentary portions. I may have missed an explanation at the beginning, and so I checked online, and found he was yet another victim of type 2 diabetes. He had a diabetic ulcer on one of his feet, and that needed some severe treatment. He only walks now with the aid of a stick. It is why I keep a close eye on my blood glucose, and try to keep it as low as I can.

  It was some time before 9pm when I went to bed. I thought I had little chance of getting to sleep that early, and read in bed for quite some time. I was only 20 or so pages from the end of the book I was reading, and I read it to the end before trying for sleep. The Book was "The End Of The Matter" by Alan Dean Foster. It was one of those books that is nearly all good, but some bits can be annoying. One annoying bit was the end. It tied up all the loose ends, but somehow felt rushed and incomplete - It was like it had finished with "and they lived happily" instead of "and they lived happily ever after".  The latter feels more complete somehow.

  After turning out the light I had one of those "am I ever going to get to sleep ?" situations that ended with "oh look, a few hours seems to have passed without noticing it". I woke up a lot in the night for reasons that became apparent later on. I remember waking at 4am, for yet another pee, and thinking that I could not remember dreaming anything. In the next couple of hours I seemed to dream a lot.

  Memories of those dreams are fading fast. One was about being in hospital, but not as a patient. I am not sure what my role was. For part of the dream I was a friend of someone who was having a robotic knee replacement, but most of the time I just seemed to be exploring. The more I try and remember the second dream I can't seem to say whether it was early this morning, or from the day before.

  In this dream I was in an electronics workshop building a piece of test equipment....I am getting a strong sense of deja vu as I try and describe this. I feel sure I am describing an old dream, but it is all so hazy that it seems good that I can remember anything to describe. I think I'll leave it that the test equipment worked, and everyone was happy, rather than try and regurgitate what I am sure I have already described.

  I was not happy when I checked my blood glucose this morning. It was just over the red line at 10.1mmol/l. It was not that unexpected considering how part 1 of my Indian takeaway affected me. I should have been a lot more careful with other stuff I ate yesterday, but in the case of the steak slices I had to eat them sooner or later because they don't have a long shelf life.

  One of my tasks, probably for this morning, is to prepare and part cook a much more healthy dinner for tonight. That should help get my blood glucose down to a more sane reading. The only fly in the ointment is that I think, but I am not 100% sure sure, that Jodie will be over for a Sunday afternoon beer tasting session this afternoon. Having a healthy dinner ready to finish cooking after it will be good, and most of the beers we tend to drink have very little sugar in them (but not all). The tricky bit is that I obviously don't want to drink on an empty stomach. I probably need something that is a bit greasy, but has hardly any sugar in it. I'll have to think about that.....

  One problem today, and I've only just checked it, is that there are no trains between Elmers End and Catford Bridge today. Hopefully on a bright(ish) and warm(ish) day she will be happy to get the bus. It would be very convenient if the could let me know if she definitely wasn't coming over so I could do something else, like going for a walk, or going trainspotting (trains are running between Victoria and Sevenoaks via Catford station today, but only half hourly).