Both the BBC and the Met Office say this morning should feature full sunshine, but it is too cloudy for any sunshine right now. Three quadrants of the sky are mostly blue, but the last quarter, the east, where the sun should be is covered by lots of cloud. It is light coloured cloud, and it will probably disperse, but for now it is all a big disappointment. Even if we do get the promised full sunshine for a lot of the afternoon, the temperature today is only expected to rise to 17° C. Tomorrow is currently shown to feature a full covering of white cloud for the whole day, but the temperature should still reach 17° C.
 
   The motif for almost the whole of yesterday was fasting. It was a day with no great distraction, and that should have made fasting very difficult, but somehow it wasn't far off being easy. I probably ought to do it a lot more. I might even half doing it today !

  I thought I had had an awful night, but it seems that I didn't really lose that much sleep because I didn't seem to be able to have more than one short snooze. I guess two reasonable amounts of sleep count as good as a full nights sleep even if there was an almost 4 hour period of no sleep in the middle. I described my sleep yesterday morning, but what I am describing here is the outcome of the day, yesterday.

  I'll try and get things in a more chronological order now.... On the (incorrect) assumption I would be like a zombie I didn't bother to do anything like have a shower in preparation, but for several hours I assumed I might still have a shower. Once I gave up on that idea I used the bath to do some laundry (in my big builders buckets). I was quite surprised just how much I had to do. I only did two t-shirts, but I did do a full weeks worth of underpants.

 The funny thing is that I am sure I used to do a lot more than this in a single wash. Maybe my buckets are shrinking or something because they seemed pretty full. Another little oddity was that I thought it was going to be hard work, and that maybe I might end up splitting the job into two half sessions, but once I got started it seemed easy to finish it all at once, and hang it all on the clothes horse to dry overnight with the help of a desk fan to keep the air moving.

  As I wrote that last paragraph I got to thinking if it was really the case that it seemed too much like hard work at time in the past, and I actually needed to take a break half way through. In the case of heavy bath towels, which need a ridiculous amount of rinsing, it probably is the case that I need a break half way through to get my breath back. At other times it could have just been that it is a semi boring job, and my mind was distracted towards other stuff I wanted to do. Yesterday was a bit of a boring day, and so the laundry became almost interesting.

  Another interesting thing was trying to take a good picture of my full, professional looking, camera set up. In theory it should have been a quick job. One thing that slowed it down was the need to use flash because the light in the back bedroom, where I could take the photo against a blank wall, was not very good. I had the subject, the camera, very close to the wall, and I found that unless I got the flash in the perfect condition I was getting a lot of shadows on the wall.
  I have to confess that I got bored, and didn't spend the time I could have taken to get everything right - which is stupid because I had all the time in the world. On the other hand I only wanted a picture to see what it would look like. The final picture is above, and features two profiles side by side.

  The curious thing is how the camera looks very lopsided in the left hand, looking down the lens, shot. I am sure that the name "Nikon" is on the centre line, but it looks really offset here. I had fitted the extra battery pack on the bottom, and that gives the camera a square outline which seems at odd as the way I think I see it in real life. The biggest disappointment is that I could think of no easy way, short of cutting a hand off, and glueing it to the camera body, to give some sort of idea of the scale of the image. It is definitely a big camera, and the Sigma lens on the front is very chunky, and also very heavy. Combined with the weight of the camera, plus the extra battery pack, and to a lesser extent the flash gun too, it needs a bit of strength to wield this camera !

  As I think I admitted yesterday morning, I didn't full fast yesterday morning. I had a handful of peanuts to hold down the taste of the cod liver oil capsule I had taken among the rest of my morning pills. By 5pm I was getting quite hungry, but the good thing was that my blood glucose had fallen to a more sane, but higher than desired, 9.2mmol/l. I was then looking forward to dinner.

  I didn't have the best combination of stuff to make a healthy dinner, but I did have stuff for a tasty dinner. It was 4 small beef burgers (the type that shrink to half size when well cooked), and a small portion of big oven chips. Apart from the fact that some of the chips were a bit undercooked, it was rather delicious with a good squirt of (reduced sugar and salt) tomato ketchup on it. If I don't get to the shops today I could be repeating that dinner tonight.

  I watched the usual three Star Treks in the early evening, and than too a one hour break from TV before turning on again to watch an edition of QI. I had the choice of two episodes, but I thought 10pm was later enough. When QI finished I went to bed where I read until almost 11pm. I didn't thing I felt very tired, but once I turned the light out I seemed to fall asleep almost straight away.

  It may have helped that I left the heating off while watching QI, and my bedroom was cooling off when I tried for sleep. It seemed to be the right temperature for good sleep. I'm not sure when it was, maybe near 1am, when I woke up feeling cold because I seemed to have part kicked the duvet aside. I turned the heater on low at that point, and pulled the duvet around me. It took maybe 10 minutes before I was comfortable enough to get to sleep.

  I think I may have only woken once more for pee before it was time to get up. I feel sure I remember dreaming, but not what any dreams were about. I think I expected my blood glucose to be higher than it was, but at the same time I was hoping it might be lower after all that fasting. It was actually 8.3mmol/l, and I guess that was probably in the middle of my best and worst estimates. In fact it is below my typical month average, and that must make it good.

  The sun has finally broken through, and now I can plan my day. The first think should be to go to the pharmacy to see if my missing items are in stock now. I could then go round the corner to Aldi and get some bits and pieces in there. All that is going to use up a bit of energy I am hoping to use for a walk in the sunshine today. I am having fantasies about trying to push a walk to 5 miles today. If I do embark on it I have some ideas that take me past several railways stations where I can bail out if the walk proves too stressful. I don't want to damage myself because I have tentative plans for going to see some live music in Rochester tomorrow, but that does depend on the weather in Rochester being friendly tomorrow.