The sky is quite cloudy, but the sun keeps finding it's way through the clouds. The latest revision shows full sunshine for midday, and then light rain at 1pm. It might be dry, but cloudy after that until light rain starts again at about 6pm. The temperature should peak at 17° C in the early afternoon. Tomorrow is currently shown as all dry, except for 3pm when light rain may fall, but it will be a dull cloudy day. It will also be rather cool with a high of only 13° C predicted.
 
  The big disappointment yesterday was hearing from Angela that she wouldn't be coming to the pub at lunchtime. She was expecting a plasterer to arrive and re-plaster a ceiling damaged by a water leak. There were other disappointments yesterday, but I'll explain those in due course.

  Not meeting Angela in the pub seemed to mean that I was in no rush to get to the pub, but the odd thing was that after taking my time doing the usual ritual of shave, shampoo, and shower, followed by dressing, I seemed ready to go to the station at the usual time. Also as usual, I picked up two copies of The Metro, and did a bit of train photography.
  This time I was lucky in the the first train I used, was one I didn't have a photo of. It was only the rear unit of this 10 car train that was new for my collection of class 465 trains. Note also the bright sunshine causing the deep shadow under the platform canopy.
  When I arrived at Ladywell station I was suddenly reminded of a picture I had taken at the same spot as this about 20 years ago. It was the old style self service ticket machine with a huge matrix of buttons for individual destinations. It was only very recently when I came across the old picture in my photo archives, and I was saddened that I only had a low resolution camera in those days, and so little detail was visible. The original of the picture above can be zoomed in for mor details, but most of the "action" takes place on the screen, and a picture could only show what is happening at a single instant (although a video could obviously show more). At some not too distant time I will take my highest resolution camera, and possibly a tripod, and get a pin sharp picture of one of these ticket machines (maybe the one at Catford Bridge station that wouldn't be in the shade in the morning).

  It was about 12:45 when I arrived at the pub. Ayse was pleased to get a copy of The Metro. I was not so pleased that the price of Guinness has gone up again to £4.70 a pint, although that is still relatively cheap compared to many pubs where Guinness can cost in excess of £5, and sometimes even £6 or more. I sat down and started on the crosswords in The Metro. The quick crossword was indeed quick, and I finished it in little more than 5 minutes, and certainly no more than 10 minutes.

  My next disappointment of the day was the cryptic crossword. I don't think I was able to concentrate as had as I should have done. There were frequent distractions from the banter in the pub - which was enjoyable - but even so I thought I could do better than just two clues solved ! It could have been a good excuse to stay for an extra pint of Guinness to spend longer scratching my head, trying to solve more clues, but I decided I would only have two pints, and keep a clearer head for the rest of the afternoon.

  As I walked back to Ladywell station I heard lots of sirens going, and through a few of the gaps where you cans see traffic on the road I saw two ambulances followed by a fire engine racing up the road. I heard even more sirens, but I couldn't see what they were. I would guess there were a couple of police cars, and possibly another fire engine or two. If they went straight on they would have been heading towards Crofton Park or Brockley, or they could veer left and start to head towards Catford.
  After getting the train back to Catford Bridge I started walking towards home. I was only halfway there when I spotted the air ambulance. It circled around a couple of times before descending to land somewhere not that far from the other side of the railway. It was quite low when I managed to get the snap above. My guess is that it probably landed in the park (Ladywell Recreation Ground), and possibly quite close to Prendergast school, but I have yet to find out what the emergency was.

  After getting home I tucked into a couple of Tesco chicken and bacon pies. I had cooked them before going out, and ate them at room temperature. I guess it is my taste buds, ravaged over the years by this and that, including any legacy left from having Covid, but I found them to be pretty tasteless. Then again, most of the filling seemed to be just white sauce with a few small lumps of chicken floating in it. I'm not sure I actually saw any bacon.

  Once I had eaten I prepared the photos I had taken, and then started to research on the internet for any news of what had drawn out so many emergency vehicles, including the air ambulance. I searched high and low, but found nothing except some other news stories that I stopped to read. I also did a quick search this morning, but I found no obvious clues as to what had been going on.

  I waited until almost 6pm until I had my dinner. It was the beef and broccoli stew I had cooked for the previous night, but didn't eat. After even more time in the slow cooker, and the addition of some gravy granules, it was more like a lumpy soup. It was delicious, although I think cabbage instead of broccoli might have been nicer.  It was about half an hour after that when disaster struck !

  I can't remember why I did it, but I fiddled about with the desktop settings on my PC, and somehow it all went very weird. I now remember exactly what I was doing. In preparation to an eventual change/updating my Linux operating system, I decided to collect all the images I use to make my desktop look like Windows XP into one place so they would be easy to find if I needed to use them again, and also that maybe they would survive any change because I was storing them in the home partition of the file system (unlike in Windows, the operating system is stored in it's own partition of the hard disk, and the home partition is never changed).

  The next thing was to test the images by using these now local images. Suddenly I lost the panel (taskbar in Windows parlance) and the desktop background changed to pure white. The media player was still showing Star Trek:Voyager in a screen I couldn't get to, but I could hear the sound. All the ways of trying to reset the desktop and panel were also unavailable. After a lot of head scratching I realised this was my cue to install the latest version of Linux Mint. Fortunately I had a DVD disk already burnt that I could use to do the install.

  Installing Linux Mint 21.1 is as easy as any version of Linux Mint, and it was basically finished within about 15 to 20 minutes, but then there were a pile of updates to download and install. The latter probably took 10 to 15 minutes. It is the next bit that takes a lot of time - configuring things to my liking. That includes installing quite a few programs that are not installed along with the operating systems - things like Kaffeine, the simplest to use DVB-T TV viewer. It is what I use to watch virtually all the off air TV I watch.

  One annoyance is that the latest versions of VLC player do not support RTSP video streams from things like security cameras. I wasted ages trying to track down an earlier version that did support those streams. Fortunately I discovered a very simple viewer for rstp streams, and it works really well. One program I could not find is one I use daily. It adds a small area on the panel (taskbar) that allows me to easily pick and copy non keyboard characters. The one I use daily is the symbol for degrees (°) that I use for commenting on the weather. The big trouble is I can't remember what the program is called, or even what I was searching for when I originally found it. At the moment I am copying and pasting it from stuff I had written before this big change !

  It was about 9pm when I had got enough of my customisations installed or configured, and I decided it was time for bed. I thought I felt very tired, but I just couldn't get comfortable in bed. Various bits ached, and I guess the worst bits were my arms. I could not seem to find a position where at least one bit of one arm wouldn't ache. It was probably made worse by the temperature. It was once again in that stupid area where I feel too cold without the duvet, and too hot with it. I partly cured the aches problem with a couple of Paracetamol tablets, and the heat problem by eventually turning on the heat - low for most of the time, but high an hour or so before getting up.

  In the end I seemed to sleep reasonably well. I have a hazy memory of having some dreams that I didn't like, but all details have evaporated again. It was about 6:30am when I got up, and went through the usual routine. I was hoping that my blood glucose would have gone down a bit lower this morning, but 8.5mmol/l is spot on average, and nothing to get particularly excited about. If today was different in almost every way I would attempt to get it lower still tomorrow.

  That is unlikely today. This morning I need to go to Tesco to get ingredients for tonight's dinner, and the next few dinners ahead. This afternoon should be a beer tasting session with Michael and Jodie. I'll have my dinner slow cooked before that, and provided I eat it I my blood glucose will be partly controlled, and hopefully not much higher tomorrow. If I have any spare time I will do more customisation of this PC. I may check one of my other PCs or laptops for reminders of stuff to do.