Maybe with some small differences, both the BBC and Met Office weather forecasts agree that today is going to be very wet ! In the latest revision the BBC has added a thundery shower for 2pm. The Met Office now say that heavy rain will finish at 11am, and then there will be light rain until 5pm (with a possible break at 1pm). From 5pm there could be sunny spells until sunset. The BBC agrees with that too. The afternoon temperature should be 14° C. Tomorrow may only reach 12° C, but the morning could feature sunny spells. The evening could be very wet ! It is odd that both the BBC and Met Office broadly agree on tomorrows forecast. I suspect that like so many days around this time of the year, that the weather is in a state of constant flux, and the forecast can only provide very broad brush strokes. For instance this morning's heavy rain has been more in the form of passing showers between either no rain, or just drizzle.
 
  Apart from the afternoon beer drinking session, I didn't really have any definite plans for the rest of the day, and in the end that included any plans for dinner. Any vague ideas masquerading as possible plans were all disrupted by the surprise news that I was expecting an Amazon delivery of some books, and that took precedence over everything.

  Fortunately I had very little to do to prepare for the drinking session, and I could relax about that. One potential plan was to go to Tesco because my cupboard is close to bare (but fortunately I still have an assortment of things like cans of soup, and other dried or frozen long life stuff. Raiding the back of the freezer was useful for my dinner last night. One thing I should have done was to turn on my slow cooker around midday so it would be bubbling hot in the middle of the afternoon, and I could turn it to low until it was dinner time. I guess I am still learning about the slow cooker, and  completely forgot to turn it on in time.

  It was 3.30pm when my Amazon parcel was delivered. That is quite early for them. It was three SciFi omnibus books, but they were not exactly as expected. Two of them were collections of short stories from just single authors. I hope they are good writers. The other thing is that the books are a lot smaller than expected. I was expecting large format paperbacks that were almost 2 inches thick. It is possible that the fourth book I ordered might be as expected. It had better be because it is almost twice the price of the others. It may not arrive for another week, although I don't see any reason it couldn't be here in a few days.

  As I mentioned yesterday, my breakfast was toasted Turkish flat bread (not pitta bread, but "proper" bread) with melted cheese on it. I was intending to dispose of the last third of that bread for lunch as a buffer against the oncoming beers. Unfortunately I was distracted, and later came down to almost a black cinder. It wasn't the sort of burnt toast that can be scraped, and anyway it was just carbon for almost half the original thickness ! I put it in the compost bin, and just ate the cheese that I had intended to put on it.

  That burnt toast was one distraction that made me forget to put the slow cooker on. I did put it on several hours too late for the heaps of slice white cabbage I had added to be cooked in time for dinner.  In the meantime Jodie arrived, a bit later than usual, and we commenced drinking. I was surprised when she showed interest in a couple of the "Lager Of The World" I had ordered mainly for Michael's benefit. One she was surprised to see was actually brewed in the real country of origin, and not a Heineken beer factory in Belgium (where they really should know better).

  There was another lager that Jodie did not recognise at all. So we ended up having a few lagers among some more serious beers. Incidently, Jodie did confirm my suspicions that Tesco was not open yesterday. That made it easier to bear not making it when I needed to top up my food stores. Jodie headed to the station to get the 6.29pm train to take her to Clock House station where she was meeting her boyfriend in the nearby The Hounds beer emporium.

  I would have been looking forward to tucking into my slow cooked lamb and white cabbage stew as soon as Jodie had left, but I put the slow cooker on so late that it was only just starting to boil, and the cabbage was mostly uncooked. I'll be having it for dinner tonight, but for last night I found three very thin pork "breakfast burgers" in the freezer, and a packet of Jalapeño cheese bites also in the freezer. I put them all in the mini oven/grill to cook, and while waiting I ate the very last slice of cheese in the house, and some almonds.

  I was expecting that the TV offerings last night to be very thin, very crap, but there was one thing I noticed that I did end up watching. It was the very latest James Bond Film "No Time To Die" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Time_to_Die). It was a curious film - both hackneyed and attention grabbing.  It was also surprisingly long. I stayed watching it to the end, and that was at gone 11pm !

  Before trying for sleep I was determined to read the last 5 or 6 pages of a novel I have been reading. It was John W Campbell's "Who Goes There?" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Goes_There%3F). It is a rather splendid story that inspired the movie "The Thing" and was also inspiration for many sub plots in assorted films  and TV series. It should have been scary, but somehow it wasn't - maybe because although I may not have read it before, the ending was fairly easy to guess, and of course it is not done to kill off the heroes !


  It was probably just before midnight when I fell asleep, and apart from getting up earlier than such a late night should have dictated, I slept rather well. I only remember waking up twice in the night, and the second time was at 5am when I might have just woken to check the time as much as anything else. As seems to have been the case a lot recently, I am aware of having many dreams, but I only seem to remember a part of just one dream.

  It is a shame I don't remember the start of that dream because it would be interesting to know how I came to apparently inherit, or maybe was gifted a house 6 houses away from mine. I think it was while walking down the road to look at it I "discovered" that somehow I had also inherited, or been gifted a second house halfway between my existing house and the one I was going to visit. Probably the oddest thing is that nothing really happened in the bit of dream I remember. All I remember is walking a couple of hundred yards down the road, and apart from looking at the front doors of two houses, that was about it !

  My random eating whatever seemed to be available had a not unexpected bad effect on my blood glucose reading this morning. It had risen to a not desperately bad, but bad enough, 9.1mmol/l this morning. Fortunately my dinner - the lamb stew with cabbage that I will definitely have ready to eat by dinner time, should be safe for tomorrow provided I don't eat too recklessly at lunch time. It is possible, although maybe unlikely, that I will skip lunch.

  The reason that it is unlikely I will skip lunch is because I relaly have to try and get to Tesco to get some shopping in today - and that usually brings some naughty temptations. Before I can go to Tesco I need a quick shower, and before I can have a quick shower I need to finish washing some t-shirts and underwear that have been soaking in detergent overnight. Once that is done I can have my shower, and venture out into the cold rain to get my shopping. I may do nothing but reading for the rest of the afternoon !