The Met Office forecast actually says today will be dry, but overcast. The BBC website throws in some random hours of drizzle. Somehow the BBC forecast seems more likely when I look at the heavy grey sky bearing down on us. I suppose that 11° C is better than nothing, but as we are now over a quarter of the way into the year I would have expected more. Tomorrow night, and the night after that are expected to be particularly cold nights with temperatures down to 3 or 4°, but tomorrow after will probably be 11° C again, although I would have hoped it would be a lot higher because both the Met Office and The BBC agree that tomorrow after should feature both sunny spells and full sunshine.
 
  Yesterday was not as dull as expected, although here I am not taking about the weather - that was definitely dull. It started with a shopping trip, and after that I did all sort of small jobs. Many were routine stuff, and not exactly exciting, and so involved finance, and that is always very scary no matter which way the money is moving.

  My late morning shopping trip was to Savers, and because it is just a few paces away, also to Poundstretcher. In savers I bought the usual sort of stuff - toothpaste, vitamin tablets, shampoo and conditioner, plus some bleach (for the toilet, and not my hair !). In Poundstretcher I bought some nice sugar free cans of "Dark Berry" flavoured cans of fizzy drink, some crisps like things, and some other foods.

  It was after midday when I got home from Shopping - it was almost midday before I went out. It seemed a fair time to have some lunch. Now I will admit I was a bit free and easy about what I ate after starting the day with a very nice low blood glucose reading. I started with some crisp like things, except they were baked, very light with added holes. As far as I could make out from the nutritional panel on the back (where English was the third or fourth language) their sugar content was quite low.

  It was too long after finishing those crisp like things that I fancied eating more. I had noticed that some Reeva branded instant noodles boasted just 0.8gm of sugar per 60gm pack. I thought it sort of safe to make up and eat two of them. I didn't check, but I think they were very close to their use by date because they were heavily discounted to just 24p per pack. They still tasted nice and I enjoyed them.

  Prior to my shopping trip I had a shower, and at the end of the shower I put two t-shirts and 5 pairs of underpants in to soak in detergent. I had a rest after my extended lunch. After that I got on doing the rinsing and fabric conditioning stages of my laundry. Once it was all hanging up  to dry on the clothes horse, it almost seemed like I had nothing else to do, but I found there were quite a few little things to do.

  It all started with loose thoughts about the possibility of a takeaway for dinner, but In thought I had better check my bank accounts and pay off my credit cards (although both were in advance of the payment date). The amount on both credit cards was slightly less than typical, and I saw my two expected pension payments for last month had been paid to my current account. My finances were looking healthy enough to waste money on a delicious takeaway later.

  I think it was after that when I started doing some computer backups, although the order I did everything seems hard to recall. I first backed up my pictures (including, and mostly my photos) to two external USB hard disks. Both were of different makes, and so, in theory, both were unlikely to fail at the same time. In theory I should have back up copies that will last beyond my lifetime. I did the same for the whole of my home partition on my PC. That also includes those same picture, and in addition, every other personal file, and things like the current state of my email client, and web browsers.

  It was about 5pm when I thought I would check my blood glucose to see if it was as low as I hoped, and therefore I could be a bit less fussy about what my takeaway could contain. I was stunned to see the meter say it had gone up to 12.5mmol/l. That was far into the red zone. I think that what was going on was something I always feared - the digestive system enzymes converting carbohydrates to sugars. I had eaten a lot of carbohydrates even if the continued very little added sugar.

  That reading put paid to a takeaway, and I was wondering if I could skip dinner. I decided not to skip dinner for the simple reason that I felt very hungry. I quickly started cooking a safe, or mostly safe, dinner. It was stewed diced beef with sprouts and a few sugar snap peas. It was not so long ago that I discovered that sugar snap peas do have a fair bit of sugar in them. I had ignored most of the last bag of them that I had bought, and noted that one was actually sprouting, and quite a few of them were looking very sorry for themselves. I added the best looking ones to my dinner.

  I ate dinner while watching the usual Star Treks, and then went on to watching a documentary about Jimi Hendrix's death on Sky Arts. I hoped it would also have a lot of his music in it, but there were very little. Instead, like too many documentaries about all sorts of things, they stretched out about 10 minutes of facts and speculations to a full 90 minutes. It was interesting in places, but boring and tedious a lot of the time. I ended up turning over to watch QI in the middle of it.

  I can't say it was a very good QI episode. For one thing it was a Xmas themed episode (edition ?), and those can be very tedious. Nevertheless I watched it through to the end. Then I turned back to Sky Arts to see more of what I had already seen in the same documentary. There was another Hendrix documentary following the first, but I declined to watch it. One thing I did before I went to bed was to re-check my blood glucose.

 I don't normally dare to check my blood glucose so soon after eating, although I guess over two hours had passed since I last ate. To my great surprise it was back down to 7.5mmol/l. That was rather good, and I looked forward to at least a similar figure this morning. I went to bed feeling sort of happy, but mostly tired. I read for a while, and I think I had put the book down, turned out the light, and fallen asleep by 10pm.

 After some discomfort the night before, I took a couple of Paracetamols before going to bed, and perhaps they worked because I had a pretty good night's sleep. It was good enough that I remember very little about it. In the last hours I was dreaming, and I think it was probably a dream that involved railways, but almost all details have faded, and not enough remains to make any sort of account impossible.

  Although I say I had a very good night's sleep I may still have needed even more. I woke up just after 6am, and it was just starting to get light. I could have got up then, but I thought "just 5 minutes more". The next thing I knew was that it was 7.15am ! After going to the toilet I checked my blood glucose. I was expecting a rather magnificently low reading, but it had actually gone up during the night (how did that happen) and the reading was a very ordinary, slightly boring, 8.6mmol/l. At that level I can't take any liberties, but I can eat my normal low as feasible sugar meals today.

  I have one plan for today, and that is to wash a pair of jeans. I guess another plan is for a shopping trip to Tesco (or maybe Aldi ?). The whole grey ambience outside does not entice me out to do anything else even if it is possibly going to stay dry all day (although the BBC still says three hours of drizzle this afternoon).  Maybe it is another day to stay in the warm, and perhaps watch another episode or two of Thunderbirds (and I still have plenty of Danger Man episodes to watch).