Today has started rather dull, and cooler than recent days. It seems to be about 11° C now, but around 5am it was down to 8° C. The latest revision to the forecast has moved the first sunshine up to 9am, and I would speculate it could end up later than that, but ultimately it should turn into a sunny day, albeit just sunny spells at first. The latest revision shows the temperature could reach 20° C today. It may reach 20° C tomorrow, but perhaps only for an hour or two. It should be a bright start, but much of the day will be cloudy and dull.

  I had another busy day yesterday, or at least that is how it felt to me. I spent many more hours photo editing. One thing became very apparent as I got to the last 20 or so photos I had taken, and it was that I was right to leave the gig when I did. Judging by the sloppy photography I was getting quite tired at the end.

  I was also getting tired selecting and editing the best photos yesterday. At first I was happy experimenting with extra editing - stuff like painting out stuff on the edges of the picture that distracted from the main subject. I was also selectively lightening and darkening areas of the picture. In the last of the pictures I was doing little creative stuff - except for one picture. The very last pictures I took were of Chain doing their three songs at the open mic.

  In one respect it was less Chain, and more Jo and Chris with the house band, but the drummer used to drum for them before being sacked for being a twerp. I took about 20 pictures, and all but three were dreadful, and the remaining three were not exactly sparkling. One of the three was actually fairly rubbish, and I did spend a lot of time getting it to look better. Basically it was out of focus because there was no enough light for the camera to focus properly. I ended up using far more smoothing than usual to kill any noise, and then loads of sharpening to make the image look a bit sharper. The picture was a fairly long shot of Jo, and so there were less details to begin with. The entire effect was to make her look a lot younger - an effect enhanced by the way her hair had almost fallen towards, but not across her face.
  The original picture was in portrait style - maybe three times higher than the width, but I've cropped off the top and bottom to show here. There are some horrible artefacts, left from the heavy processing, but they may not be visible if you haven't spent ages looking the overall picture. I must admit one artifact is that Jo's face looks so unblemished it looks more plastic than human. Maybe it would be how a waxwork of her might look. I wouldn't have used this photo, but it seems I only took this one photo of Jo.

  I can't quite remember what time it was, but I would guestimate it could have been around 11am, when the doorbell rang, and it was an unexpected delivery of a Hell On Tap t-shirt that I had ordered on the 12th May. It's arrival inspired me to do a small batch of laundry so I could give the t-shirt a wash. It seemed to have a moderately unpleasant paraffin sort of smell, probably from the paint used for the drawing on the front. I had one other t-shirt in the washing bag, along with several pairs of underpants.

  I can't say I was terribly enthusiastic about doing that laundry. I seemed to have lots of minor aches that added up to not a good feeling. I first left the washing soaking in detergent, and came back to it several hours later. The first time I bent over to start all the squeeging and general battery of the stuff in the soapy water, it felt like my back might break, and my right arm fall off, but by the end of the first rinse it was like all my muscles had warmed up, and all the aches faded (although maybe not quite to zero). I had left it too late in the day to dry it all on the washing line, and I am not sure it was the best of drying days anyway. I hung it all on the clothes horse in the front room, with the desk fan blowing on it. It all seems dry and ready to wear this morning, but I think it could be next Thursday before I wear the Hell On Tap t-shirt for the first time.

   The next thing I did of any significance was to do all the washing up, and then prepare my dinner. For lunch I had a single individual Tesco steak pie. I am not sure if it was just that I didn't fancy a second one, as I have in the past when cooking individual pies, or if I was deliberately trying to be more healthy, more disciplined and stuff like that. It was probably a bit of both. It might also have been that I expected the pie to be rubbish, and maybe it was.

  Dinner was to be a great heap of salad, but it wasn't. I started preparing it, taking the ingredients out of the fridge as I needed them. The one exception might have been a red onion because I knew I didn't have any spring onions, but I decided against using red onion as a substitute. I washed and cut in two half a dozen baby tomatoes. I cut into double postage stamp size a small red bell pepper. I roughly shredded some basil, and cubed two different types of cheese. I then went to get the bag of baby salad leaves from the fridge, and they weren't there.

 I had to check the till receipt, which fortunately I still have, from my last visit to Tesco. That confirmed that I definitely hadn't bought and baby salad leaves, or any other type of salad leaves. It made my salad a bit smaller, but it was still quite tasty, and still have a good texture - possibly better than if it had a load of leaves in it. It still felt a bit small, and against all logic I decided to start on a tub of low calorie/sugar ice cream. Unfortunately I didn't stop until I had reached the bottom of the tub.

  As usual I watched three lots of Star Trek, but then I noted there was nothing on Dave to watch until about 11pm (I think it was Have I Got News For You). I could have checked the programme guides for each channel to see if I could find any alternate entertainment, but I was feeling tired, and decided to not bother with TV. I did do some quite reading from the book of short stories I was reading until I finished the book last night.

  That time reading was good because it gave time to allow my dinner to settle better. Also I didn't drink any gassy beers, although I did drink a few large whiskies. I took one other precaution an hour before trying for sleep, and that was to take a couple of Paracetamol tablets. It seemed to all work, and I had none of the acid reflux, plus assorted aches and pains that had spoiled my sleep for the preceding two nights.

  I had left the heating off before going to bed, and I seemed to be comfortable until I think it was 1am  when I woke up to find I was too hot under the duvet, and my pillow was damp with sweat.  I went back to sleep partly uncovered, but by then the temperature was dropping fast. At 3am I put the heater on low, and I was able to sleep comfortable again. I am not sure if "comfortable" is the right word because before I got up I had a dream that could be called a nightmare.

 The dream was a bit random, and didn't always follow a linear plot. I can't possibly describe it like a story, but I can describe the basic premise that classifies it as like a nightmare. I had flown, with some friends, to an unknown airport in an unknown country. I was relying on the friends to guide me, but somehow we got separated, and so did some of my luggage. The scenes seemed to jump around a lot, but the closing scene before I woke up was particularly horrible, and was probably good reason to wake up a little earlier than usual.

  I had walked a little way away from the airport, and I was on an area of pavement that had signs saying that stopping was not allowed. Oddly enough, nearly all the writing I saw was in English, but I "knew" it was a foreign country. I had stopped to get my camera out of the one bag I had with me. I wanted to take a picture of the name board above the entrance to the airport. It was my only point of reference, and I could possibly show the picture to anyone who might help point me back in the right direction to it (I think the name I saw looked very foreign, and hard to pronounce. I fumbled around with the camera, but I didn't seem to know how to operate it, and eventually I concluded the battery was flat.

  I guess as nightmares go, it was fairly tame stuff, but it was a relief to wake up from it. I think that was at one minute to 6am, and it did feel a bit early, but I needed to go to the toilet, and so it wasn't worth going back to bed. This morning was the great experiment - to try checking my blood glucose with test strips from two different canisters. Just to back track a bit. It was some time yesterday afternoon when I checked strips from both canisters with some test solution I had never ever tried before.

  The test strip from the canister I thought might be faulty read 8.7mmol/l. The test strip from the other canister, which I expected to give a lower reading, actually gave a higher reading of 9.0mmol/l. At that time I wasn't sure what to expect from the test solution, but later on I found on the test strip canisters that a reading of between 8.6 and 9.1mmol/l was to be expected. That seemed stupidly vague.

  This morning I made sure my pinprick of blood continued to flow long enough to do a reading using a test strip from each canister. The first reading, once again from the canister I suspected of reading high, gave a rather good 8.5mmol/l, and indeed I was expecting something like that based on what I had eaten. The test strip from the other canister said 9.0mmol/l. It is evident that this testing method is far from accurate, and no wonder the doctors and nurses don't trust it, and rely on a laboratory blood test. I had one last thought on the subject, and the results will be apparent tomorrow. Although the test meter didn't suggest the batteries in it might be getting weak, I put brand new batteries in it ready for tomorrow.

  A little tiny bit of today is mapped out for me.This morning I shall go to Tesco to buy the missing salad leaves, maybe even two bags of them, plus other stuff that might be useful. Tonight I am being "bullied" to go to a gig. I suppose "bullied" is far to strong a term, but I am sort of expected. I don't think it will be a good gig, but it is easy-ish to get to, although I don't like the bus route or the areas it goes through. I may just go for something like an hour, take a pile of snaps, and then head home again.

  Between Tesco and the possible gig I should go for a nice walk in the sunshine, but that, if it is as long as it would be desirable would leave me too tired to go out tonight. I may just have a lazy day doing stuff I haven't had time for over the last half week or whatever. I fancy a snooze or three, plus watching at least another episode of Star Trek: Picard. I am halfway through the last season, and it is starting to build up to a climax !