I'm not too confident it is right, but I am pinning my hopes on the latest revision to today's weather forecast. It now shows sunny spells right up to midday, and hour of no sunshine, and then sunny spells at 2pm, and full sunshine from 4pm. The temperature may reach 14° C by 1pm, and stay there for a couple of hours. A clear night means a cool morning tomorrow. It could be down to just 6° C at 6am tomorrow, but rise to 14° C like today. The morning may feature full sunshine, and then sunny spells in the afternoon. It might end with a splash of rain at 6pm. I wonder what the real weather for tomorrow will be....I also wonder how today will actually turn out.
 
   After such a nice day on Monday, yesterday was a big disappointment. At least it started nice as the picture I showed yesterday of the northern sky proved. It was little more after I took that picture that the whole sky turned grey and cloudy. There was a brief reprieve an hour later, but it only lasted 10 or 15 minutes, and from then on it became cold and grey, and miserable. It killed any ideas I might have had about going out - even to go shopping.
  This was the view of the northern sky at about 10:25am yesterday. I think the dullness confused the cameras auto white balance, and made some of the grey clouds look vaguely blue in places. It is one of the problems when they try and pack in too much artificial intelligence in cameras. I suspect it recognised sky and knew that the sky is blue, and corrected the picture incorrectly.

  Yesterday was a day for looking around at little things to do to help pass the time. I did do one big thing, and that was to hand wash three t-shirts and some underwear. I can't say I was happy doing it, and kept thinking I was getting bored, and wanted to stop, but I persevered, and got it all hanging up to dry, on the clothes horse, in the afternoon. I initially used the fan heater on low to speed up the drying, and thought I would take the advantage of some warmth in the dining room to do something, but in the end I didn't.

  One little thing I did was maybe not so little, and while it was constructive, it was also quite destructive. It was many months ago, probably as much as a year ago, maybe even more than that, when I had a little accident that broke the screen on my little 8 inch screen mini laptop. It was a handy little thing, although it ended it's days being no more than an mp3 music player in the dining room.

  It is possible that several months passed before I carefully opened up the lid of the laptop to see if I could find a part number for a new screen. They did seem to be quite rare when I searched for one, and ridiculously expensive. I declined that idea, and left the laptop alone for several more months. I then thought I would at least recover the hard disk in it, and the RAM memory, but it proved to be a bugger to open up.

  It wasn't until yesterday that I first saw the hard disk in it, and also found that the first 1 GB of memory was hard soldered to the motherboard. To get that deep I had to get the keyboard out, and I am not sure I didn't damage it in the process. With the keyboard out I could take out every single screw I could find, but I still could not get the back bezel open. It was that that I thought the only answer was brute force and ignorance. That laptop can never be put back together again, but at least I got the hard disk out.

  That hard disk had three operating systems on it - Linux Mint 13, Linpus (a special stripped down Linux that was built specifically for the laptop by Acer, the maker), and Windows XP. Out of curiosity I swapped that hard drive for the one in my less powerful Dell laptop. Linpus half booted, but then said it couldn't find the disk image. Linux Mint 13 to an extra 30 seconds to boot as it considered the new hardware, but then booted up into a fully working desktop - including WiFi. Windows XP tried to start up, but just choked. I may have tried to repair it, but it didn't seem worth it.

  Another little job yesterday was a bit of cooking. I prepared two dinners - only one of which I would eat yesterday. The one I ate last night used up the rest of of the pack of minced beef that I used the first half for dinner a few days ago. It was basically no more than the mince with sprouts. It was quite nice, although I could still taste sprouts several hours later. The second dinner, for tonight, is chicken with pak choi.
  It occurred to me yesterday that the pictures I had taken on my walk on Monday had mostly come out nice and sharp. The bright sunshine certainly helped, but even so some credit must go to the lens I was using. It was a 28-300mm zoom lens made by Tamron. That zoom range was just right for most photos I would want to take while out for a walk. The significance of all this is that I have another Tamron lens. It is a 18-200mm zoom lens, designed for my Nikon camera (the camera above is obviously a Canon).

   That range should be very handy for gig photography on bigger stages, but for some reason it always seems to give very soft photos. I am sure I have checked carefully that the problem is not the camera focussing on the wrong point, but is similar to have a soft filter on. That would be great for doing arty shots of a woman when soft focus is often used to make the skin look clearer, but over half the bands I take pictures of are all male, and besides, I want super sharp shots of things like guitar strings. Any soft focus effects I can add in post production. It seems odd to me that the two lenses by the same maker can be so different.

  Last night was very complicated. I initially felt very tired, although I stayed up to 10pm watching Have I Got News For You. After going to bed soon after 10pm I read for possibly as much as half an hour before trying for sleep. It was one of those occasions where nothing seems to happen, and than suddenly you are fast asleep. That is when things got complicated. Sometimes I seemed to be awake, but thinking about what I think I had been dreaming about. I can't work out of I really was awake, or if it was all part of the dream.

  At 3.30am I really did wake up, and didn't seem to get back to sleep for an hour or more. Some of the reason for that insomnia was, once again, thinking about what I think I was dreaming about. It was mostly a philosophical discussion about "is sexiness the same as attractiveness" ?". I concluded no, but with rather vague limits. It was all very long and complicated, but can be summed up by considering something like an Easter Egg. It doesn't matter how pretty the packaging is, it tells you nothing about the egg inside. The cheapest, nastiest, American chocolate can be made to look good with a slinky covering of pretty patterned foil.

  I didn't seem to have much luck sleeping from, say, 4.30am until I got up at about 6.30am. It didn't feel like I slept at all, but I know I did because I noticed chunks of time missing on the clock. I think I have possibly switched my sleeping to the longer days of summertime when less sleep is needed. I don't feel that sleepy now, but I must admit I suspect I'll be looking forward to a snooze this afternoon.

  I didn't try to eat exceptionally special yesterday, and basically treated it as a normal day. That is probably why my blood glucose reading this morning is a very normal/typical 8.5mmol/l. This afternoon will involve some booze, and control of my eating might fail a bit, but at least my dinner is ready to be heated up, and should be a very safe meal.

  My first priority today is to have a shower, and wash my hair. I didn't have a shower yesterday, and I have two excuses for why. The first is that I knew I wouldn't be going anywhere, or meeting anybody. The second is that the wind blowing in the bathroom window (which of course I could have shut) felt icy cold even when just going into the bathroom for a pee. I didn't fancy standing there naked with water running off my body in an icy howling (sort of) gale !

  If I have the time, and the energy, nipping out to Tesco would be useful this morning, but my main priority is going for my Wednesday drink in The Jolly Farmers. It is possible I could go there in sunny spells, and come home in full sunshine, but I doubt the forecast still says that even now....err, it doesn't. It now says I will be going home under a cloudy sky. I think I'll be getting the train there and back. Had it been full sunshine between midday and 1pm I might have picked up The Metro from the station, and walked all the way to the pub, but I can't see that is going to happen.

  I guess that gives me a spare 20 minutes or so when maybe I might get to Tesco. The one fly in the ointment in all this is that the book I ordered from America (without realising it) via Amazon could possibly be delivered today. After near a fortnight it is at a UK depot, but it doesn't say if that is a local depot, or another move will be needed to get it to a local depot. It is one of the most frustrating deliveries of all time. If they demand customs fees on delivery I think I shall tell them to poke it, and ask Amazon for a refund (which I doubt they will do for a book that has already travelled 2000 miles).