The Met Office came close to correctly forecasting this morning, and the BBC were far too optimistic ! This morning was, and is rather grey, and the forecast for 7am being just 10° C was correct. The latest revision to the forecast shows 9 and 10am as featuring light cloud, and then the first sunny spells at 11am. It also shows midday as sunny spells. From 1pm the Met Office agrees with the BBC forecast, full sunshine until 6pm, and then sunny spells until sunset. The afternoon temperature should peak at 19° C for a few hours. Tomorrow should be a slightly better version of day. It should feature a bit more full sunshine.

  Yesterday was annoying. As I mentioned yesterday morning, I was constipated, although I didn't feel feel that. I usually go every morning, sometimes early, and sometimes later in the morning. The day before yesterday I didn't go at all, and in the end neither did I yesterday. As I said, I didn't feel uncomfortable physically, but I did have my brain nagging me to say something could happen "any minute now" - it didn't !

  Having abandoned plans to meet Angela, or go out anywhere, I had to find useful things to do. I am not sure that much of what I did was that useful, but it seemed to take up most of the day, leaving not time to lay down and read and/or snooze. One minor, useful thing was to pay my phone bill. While I was logged into my bank I confirmed that in May I was paid two lots of state pension. It was nothing extra, but just the effect of being paid every 28 days instead of monthly. I noted that the last payment was bigger than the previous. I think that was because the state pension "pay rise" happened in the middle of the cycle. It made my bank balance look temporarily rather healthy.

  I took advantage of the healthy balance to buy some stuff ordered from Amazon. It all started when I did one of my end of month rituals - backing up all my photos and other images (scans and suchlike) to two external USB hard disks. Although both are theoretically 1TB drives, they format to two different capacities, and one of them was looking close to full. It wasn't really - it still had 100GB free, or in other words it was 90% full.

  I already had a spare 2TB USB hard disk, and I ordered another one so I could have master and slave backups with oodles of room on them. While I was rummaging around Amazon I recalled a tech news story that said that the price of RAM was very low at the moment because of over production. I am not so sure about that, but I did see a pair of 8GB memory modules, to give a total of 16GB memory in my current PC - or the next one.

  My current PC, a Dell Optiplex, has an annoying niggle. The chip set was badly designed because too many signals were overlapping and blocking each other. It can cause some severe slowdowns when, for instance, copying one USB hard drive to another USB hard drive. A later version my have cured that problem, and I did buy one. So called "renewed" ex office PC can be remarkably cheap, and I think I paid less than £100 for it. My intention is to fit the 16GB of ram in that, and swap the hard disks from my current PC to this newer one. Hopefully it will be nice and fast.

  Another little thing that soaked up some time was to fit and activate a Smarty SIM card in one of my old phones. Like Giffgaff, my current service provider, Smarty is a stand alone entity that only operates on the internet (no shops, no phone numbers of help lines etc) run by "3". Their prices seem to be slightly better than Giffgaff, and like them it is purely pay-as-you-go, you estimate your needs, and select and buy a package that will last a month. Next month you do the same.

  My particular interest in Smarty is that they specifically say tethering is allowed on all packages. Tethering is where you use a phone as a WiFi access point that your laptop, for instance, can connect to so that, as another for instance, you can use the internet in a pub with no WiFi. The only problem is that the data rate seemed rather slower than expected. It might be a local problem, but sooner or later I am going to have to lug my laptop to a pub, or somewhere and try it for real.

  I said that fitting and activating the Smarty SIM card took up some time, but it was not a lot of time - maybe little more than 15 minutes. One thing that did take up a bit more time was the (3 year old ?) phone updating a lot of apps once it had a data connection. I also installed the Smarty app. I think there is a Giffgaff app I could put on my main phone, but I have got used to doing all I need there on my PC. The Smarty app seems OK, at least on just a quick look.

  There were two notable things I also did yesterday. The first was some lunchtime cookery. I fancied something unusual, and nice for lunch. I also thought that some extra fibre in my diet might be beneficial while I had constipation. Throwing all thoughts of what it might do to my blood glucose out the window, I had sausages and baked beans for lunch. Now admittedly the sausages (from a bag of 20 frozen Richmond sausages) had previously been found to be safe, and the baked beans were HP reduced sugar and salt. Although better than many baked beans, I was still a bit unsure about their sugar content. Anyway, it made a nice change for lunch.

  The final notable job of the day was to wash a couple of t-shirts and some underwear. I had left it all soaking in detergent after my morning shower. I wish I had finished the job earlier, and got it on the washing line to dry much earlier in the afternoon, maybe not long after midday, and even before the sun broke through. It was closer to 3pm when I hung it out to dry. There was a fair breeze blowing it all around for a lot of the time, plus some sunny spells, but when I brought it in a 8pm it was still slightly damp in places - most annoying, but it dried indoors fairly quickly.
  I think I only took the picture to prove to myself I was able to use the washing line again after so many damp months since the start of this year. If you look carefully you can see shadows of the washing on the fence behind. but they are not strong shadows. The sunshine was a bit hazy, but it was almost the best there was all afternoon.

  Finally it was dinner time, and also Star Trek time. My dinner was quite simple, and one I am thinking I could do more often, although last night I did feel a strong urge to top it off with a dessert. The main course was nothing more than a pile of mixed salad leaves with ready cooked, flavoured chicken chunks, and a generous amount of Caesar dressing. The dessert was a tub of Oppo low calorie/sugar ice cream.

  I was quite disappointed by the choices for TV later in the evening - so disappointed that I turned the TV off after Star Trek: Voyager, and amused myself by reading, both book and online. I can't remember when I turned the light off and went to sleep. Maybe it was a bit before, or not long after 10pm. I was definitely feeling tired, and I seemed to fall asleep fairly quickly. Last night it was before 3am, maybe as early as 1am, when I woke up feeling cold, and turned the heater on. It was definitely a cold night, and this morning was one of the coolest for quite some time now.

  I had quite a long series of dreams. I can't remember any specific plot to these dreams, but I can remember a sort of story built up around some remembered fragments of dream. I made the story up when I woke up at 5am, or it is possible that I dreamed making up the story ! The story was that somehow I had been sent on a "back to work" training course by the job centre about a year after actually starting a job. I was offered a generous allowance to go on it, and so I booked a fortnight off work, and enjoyed a double income during that time (although the Job Centre allowance was rather small small compared to my real wages, but there might have been free food offered). In the past, during periods of real unemployment, such courses were really tedious, but the one in the dream was almost enjoyable for the simple reason that I didn't care about the outcome - I already had a job.

  This morning my blood glucose reading was higher than the previous three days, which were exceptionally low. This morning I was surprised that the reading was just 8.3mmol/l. That is under my typical average for a month, and better than many days. Incidentally, when looking at my average readings, May was just 8.79mmol/l. That is a tiny bit higher than most months. The lowest was 8.48mmol/l in February, and the highest was 8.87mmol/l in March. The whole year average for 2022 was 8.53mmol/l, and for 2021 it was 8.67mmol/l. Once you take out the occasional high peaks and occasional lows, it seems my blood glucose control has been very consistent for the last few years, and the little row of high readings last month were just a statistical anomaly.

  I am pleased to say that I am officially no longer constipated have gone about halfway through writing this. It was slightly annoying that I didn't get to see what I did. It felt moderately big, but appears to have bounced off the bottom of the toilet bowl, and resurfaced out of sight on the other side of the U bend. I am sure that is not all there is to come, particularly after that full can of baked beans yesterday, but at least it is a start.

  Today I hope I'll feel comfortable/confident enough for a shopping trip to Tesco some time this morning. This afternoon should be a beer tasting session with Jodie and Michael. I hope Jodie brings a few cans because my supplies are getting low (but only in terms of stuff that might excite Jodie - I have plenty of Abbey beers). I think Michael will probably bring something unusual too. Hopefully, like two weeks ago, he will be lucky again - finding beers that interest Jodie is hard work these days.