It seems that much of today will only feature sunny spells, but the temperature could still hit 21° C. As usual it is interesting to see what the BBC forecast website says about today. They predict only 20° C, but say there will be full sunshine all day. The biggest disparity between the two forecasters is about tomorrow. The Met Office say that after a a sunny start, most of the afternoon will be dull, and probably with no sunshine at all. The BBC say sunny spells until 4pm, and then full sunshine for the rest of the day. Both forecasters agree that tomorrow will be a little cooler at just 16° C.

  Yesterday was another day when I stayed in instead of frolicking in the sunshine. I don't know why, but I just didn't really fancy going out. At the start of the morning I didn't even have any idea how I would pass the time yesterday, but somehow it turned out to be a usefully productive day.

  It's strange, I can't seem to remember if I bothered to have a wash yesterday. I do remember that if I did have a shower I would start to wash a few assorted clothes afterwards. I didn't do any laundry, and so I suppose I didn't bother to wash. On the other hand I also seem to feel that I wished I had washed my hair before showering. My hair remains unwashed this morning, and I guess that is another clue that I didn't have a shower.

  I hope that missing one shower doesn't leave me too smelly - just in case something unexpected happens - but only a third party could judge that. Actually something unexpected did happen, but it didn't involve going out or visitors. It involved doing [muted fanfare] housework ! I didn't do any grand housecleaning schemes, but instead I did lots of little jobs. One such just was doing a bit more sorting through old paperwork to select what to keep and what to shred and throw away.

  I did come up with an impasse which brought the job to a halt - I ran out of space in the cardboard box I am keeping the file pockets in. It is no ordinary cardboard box, it is the perfect width and height for file pockets. Sadly it now lacks enough depth. What this really means is that having sorted out what each file pocket should hold, I need to go through each and reselect what I need to keep, and what might as well be thrown away.

  I have been doing that job a couple of hours at a time, on random days, for a couple of weeks now. Maybe in a few more weeks it will come to an end.....or......as I get towards the end the job will speed up until I'll race to file away the final bill (or whatever). Yesterday I may have spend 2 relaxed hours doing it before abandoning it, and putting 5 sausages in the mini grill/oven to cook. They were from a big bag of frozen Richmond sausages, and while they weren't great, they were acceptable. I ate them on their own apart from a squirt of brown sauce.

  After eating I read for a short while, and then I started another tidying up job. This one was the big one - my bedroom. Before I can do the ultimate tidying and cleaning in there I need to do many small jobs. For instance there is a lightweight, home made table in there that was originally for my PC. Over the years it came to be covered in clutter, and thick with dust. I think only washing the tablecloth on that table will clean it of all dust, but I substantially removed a lot of it.

  I also put away many of the things on it. That included a double cassette deck, or which only one side worked when I used it to transfer an ancient cassette to a computer mp3 file. That double cassette deck is now back where it was taken from quite a few years years ago - the old cupboard, and original fixture of the house, and outside my bedroom door.  That meant sorting and re-arranging some stuff in that cupboard before I could squeeze it in.

  I now have a possible new job to do, or maybe "job" is not quite the right word. I noticed I had squirrelled away an old DVB TV receiver, and an old DVD player in the cupboard. Now I wonder if they still work, and if there is any point in keeping them. Also stashed in the cupboard are three old laptops. I know two are almost identical IBM "Think books" (or something like that.

  I know one has a faulty hard disk, but it has a protection password that won't allow me to change the hard disk. I think the other one works, but at best it only good enough for something like Windows 95 ! I could probably waste a few hours playing with it, but I doubt it has much purpose these days. The third laptop seems to be an old NEC model. I remember absolutely nothing about it. I guess someone gave it to me, and I never did anything with it except stuff it in the cupboard. I expect I can look forward to wasting a whole afternoon some time investigating it.

  All these jobs, except one, were quite good in as much that they didn't need to be finished before being set aside of another day. The exception was the cupboard. I had to ram everything in it so I could close the door, and forget about it until next time. Things like investigating the NEC laptop are not something I can easily do on a whim because some coat hooks on the outside support a surprising weigh of t-shirts on coat hangers. It is annoying having to remove then to open the cupboard.

  I seemed to have come to a natural break as 5pm, and the usual start of my TV viewing on a weekday. Last night the TV offerings were a bit thin, but I did watch two repeated episodes of Guy Harvey's "From The Vaults" featuring some good videos of bands from 1978 in one episodes, and some very dubious bands in 1985 ! At this point I hadn't prepared any dinner, and that was the perfect excuse for another takeaway. I didn't do that lightly, but I did have a £10 off voucher that needed to be used.

  I used the same takeaway, via Just Eat, as I used the night before, but this time I ordered two large shish kebabs - one chicken and the other lamb. I didn't bother with any extras. With the £10 off voucher it came to just £13.50. At that price I would order a lot more, but I think I need to reign in my enthusiasm for now.  The day before I would have called the "regular" kebabs small. Yesterday I thought the large were certainly large. The odd thing is how double the size (of meat - the salad probably wasn't much bigger) didn't add more than say 15% to the price (at a rough estimate).

  After eating I finished watching TV, and spent some time reading some stuff on my PC. I then read some of the book I am reading while laying on my bed. It didn't seem to take long before it was 9pm, and I read for maybe another half hour before putting the book down and going to sleep. Last night was yet another night when the temperature was all wrong for sleeping covered or uncovered. It probably accounted for waking up every couple of hours. On those occasions I got up and went for a pee, but there was no urgency about it. It was mostly habit.

  At 3am I decided to turn the heater on low, and maybe my sleep became a bit deeper, or maybe it was just more relaxed. It was probably then when I was aware of dreaming. All I can say about my dreams is that they were a jumble of very short scenes, and while there might have been a theme of going home from work, there was no linear story. It was almost like a random slideshow of scenes.

  At just gone 5am I was woken by cramp starting in my lower right leg. As usual, I leapt out of bed, and the pain went away as soon as I was standing on my feet. I felt a bit cold, and turned the heater up full before going back to sleep. I woke up unaware that a couple of hours had slipped by unnoticed. It was 7:10am when I woke up later then expected. I still felt a bit chilly once I had moved a little way from the fan heater, and my body temperature was quite low, just 34.7° C. There is, or was, plenty of precedent for that. I seem to recall that was quite common last summer.

  I can't say that I felt good this morning, but by the same token I didn't feel specifically bad. I guess I should be describing as normal these days, but it would be good to feel good one day. The one thing that was good was my blood glucose reading, This morning it was a rather magnificent 7.4mmol/l. If I could get it prescribed on The National Health, I would end every day with a nice healthy shish kebab !

  Today should be warm, and maybe it will be sunny. I feel I should not waste another day like this. I heard from Jodie last night to say she was taking things easy after food poisoning, and would not be coming over for a drink today. That means I could potentially go out for a few hours of walking, and then snooze much of the afternoon. Maybe I'll do that, or maybe something else will happen. I think I will definitely wash my hair and have a shower today.
  While going through assorted paperwork yesterday afternoon I came across the gizmo in the picture above. It was given to me by the smoking cessation nurse in Lewisham Hospital while being diagnosed prior to my heart bypass operation (in Kings College Hospital). Although the actual anniversary is still some months away, it will be ten years since I last smoked a cigarette. The calculator gizmo says that after ten years "the risk of cancer falls to half of that of a smoker, and the risk of heart attack falls to the same as someone who has never smoked". Well, that's all good news then. I shall no post this again on the day (if I can), but all my experiences are described here.