I barely saw the sunny spell forecast for 8am. I think it started a bit before 8am, and finished a few minutes after 8am ! Today could be dry, and the latest revision to the forecast shows more light coloured cloud than in the screenshot above. Even the BBC forecast, which is often more optimistic, says no chance of any more sunshine today, but they do say it could be 12° C this afternoon, a whole degree higher than the Met Office predicts.  At the moment there seems to be very little rain forecast for tomorrow, except in the late evening, but the clouds are still shown as medium dark grey. By contrast the BBC reckon that there will be some light rain, and a lot of drizzle for almost the whole of tomorrow. Both agree that tomorrow afternoon will be 12° C.
 
  I want to write off yesterday as being a boring and non productive day, but that is not really correct. I did two important things yesterday, and a couple of minor things unworthy of any description. One important thing was to go and spend rather a lot of money in Tesco.

  I feared I would have to go and come home from Tesco in pouring rain, but it turned out the the morning was generally dry. I think the temperature was almost 12° C when I went out, and so I didn't even need a heavy coat. I probably would have been close to, but not actually, comfortable without a coat - particularly coming home with a fairly heavy load. I felt quite hot, and starting to get sticky when I arrived home.

  Somehow I managed to avoid buying anything to bad for my blood glucose - no pastries, and no potatoes and stuff. Not even any crisps - which can sometimes be safe except for the flip side of the coin - the calorie content. I did come away with an strange sort of dinner (in kit form), and I did come away with some good booze. To keep up with Sainsbury's, who started it first, Tesco were selling old stock (with a Xmas picture on the front) of 70cl Haig whisky with £11 off if bought with a Clubcard - that works out to be £17 a bottle, or exactly the same as Sainsbury's discount. The other booze I bought was a couple of bottles of St Bernadus abbey brewed beer.

  When I got home I had my strange sort of lunch. It was some German ham, which tasted fine (some recent ham from two different supermarkets seemed to taste stale), a tub of sour cream with cheese and chives, and some rice cakes to scoop out the tub of sour cream, and for a carrier for the ham.  It was a fairly pleasing, and slightly filling lunch. It was maybe only spoiled by the rice cakes. They tasted a bit dusty like they had been made with rice from the bottom of the barrel.

  After lunch I went into lazy mode, and rested on my bed while reading. I did that for a bit longer than I should have. As I wrote yesterday, one of the things I thought I would do was to do some laundry. I had left it soaking in detergent after my shower. It was just two t-shirts, but there were more pairs of underpants than I thought - 7, to be precise, and it ended up as a bigger job than expected.

  The worst thing was that the detergent everything was soaking in was almost stone cold by the time I started the job. That always feels nasty and slimy despite wearing rubber gloves. Fortunately the first rinse, after wringing out that cold detergent, was in warm water (that being all that is available in my bath, although I could put some sort of hose on the cold tap if it still works).

  I thought I would finish the laundry in one go, but I seemed to get bored near the end, and I think it was bored rather than my energy wearing out. I took a short break before wringing out the last rinse, and doing the fabric conditioner. It was actually quite late in the afternoon, maybe around 4pm, before I finished the washing, and hung everything up to dry on the clothes horse. To save electricity I just used a fan to speed up drying. I turned the fan off overnight, and this morning it all felt cold and slightly damp. I have now put a fan heater on low because I might want the dining room to be warm later today.

  Not a lot happened then until dinner time. Dinner was not quite how it was intended to be. For one thing it was chicken breast stew with mainly odds and ends rather than one leafy vegetable such as cabbage - about the healthiest meal I can manage.  There were 5 small potatoes in it, along with a very large, orange, bell pepper plus some mange tout. The biggest divergence from intended was the gravy granules. I thought I would thicken it up, but instead of spooning the gravy granules out, I poured directly from the container. Unfortunately there was an avalanche, and instead of slightly thick gravy I had something that could hold a spoon upright !

  It did make for a much more filling dinner. I have never considered how much sugar and other bad stuff there might be in gravy granules because usually I only use it in small quantities, and even then not that frequently. Prior to dinner I had a single can of Guinness, but after dinner I had two more very strong ales from the Buxton brewery. One was 12.5%, and the other was 16.7%. Both were exceedingly nice, and the two, plus the Guinness, got me 90% of the way towards being drunk.

  Last night was not a good night. Not only was there nothing of any interest on any TV channels in the evening, but I slept terribly. Almost everything conspired to spoil my sleep. Bits of me, mainly arms and shoulders, but my chest also had a go too, ached, and then there was the old two hot and two cold problem. On top of that I had the problem of my mind not shutting up  - although maybe that was dreaming and I didn't realise it.

  I did seem to have quite a few short dreams, and most of them seemed to be instantly forgettable. One I do remember because it seemed odd. I was at a doctors surgery, but I didn't seem to be there for any treatment. If anything I was there to repair something, but in the fullness of the dream, that may have not lasted more than a minute or two, I never found out what it was I was repairing - if indeed that was my reason for being there.

  I wonder if that dream was inspired by one of my my purchases in Tesco yesterday. It was some (alleged) high power AAA cells for my wrist mounted blood pressure meter. I think that when the pump starts up it draws a lot of power from the batteries for a short time. Cheap (Poundshop) batteries can't seem to deliver that power surge for two readings in a row. I hope the Tesco extra power/long life AAA cells will fare a lot better. It was a sort of medical thing that could have triggered the dream.

  This morning my blood glucose has gone up to 8.9mmol/l. That is rather close to 9.0 where I start to get mildly worried. I don't know whether to blame it on the gravy granules, the potato in my dinner, the strong beers, or even the could of blood oranges I had for a snack late in the afternoon. Maybe I ate something else that I have forgotten about. Maybe it is also because I seemed to be constipated yesterday morning (until I came home from Tesco). This morning I haven't been yet, and maybe I feel a few very light twinges of discomfort at the moment.

  I can imagine the possibility that I won't go for a poo until early afternoon, and that it will stink the place out just as I would prefer it to smell fresh. I was too drunk on Thursday to accurately remember if Jodie said she would be over for a beer tasting session this afternoon, and so I have to work on the assumption that she will be over. So one job today will be some light tidying up in the dining room, and maybe even, gulp !, some hoovering. There is some debris in the dining room from when I was cutting up old beer delivery boxes, as well the usual day to day detritus. I had better get dinner prepared, and half cooked before we start drinking beer - if indeed Jodie does visit.