This morning was quite cool. I think it may have been at 5am I noticed my thermometers saying it was only 9.5° C. By now we should be getting sunny spells, but all there is, is very hazy sunshine that can't even cast more than a very dull, indistinct shadow. The latest revision to the forecast now says the first sunny spells will be at 11am, and then midday will be dull again. 1pm should/could see the start of full sunshine, and the temperature could then rise to 21° C by mid afternoon. Tomorrow may see a perfectly clear sky from sun rise to sun set, but the temperature may only rise to 21° C again.

  Yesterday was yet another day where my plans never came to fruition - except for one plan. As I mentioned yesterday, I realised that a small parcel delivery from Amazon was due to be delivered yesterday. I had a bad feeling it would disrupt my plan to go to Brockley to watch a few bands playing at the Brockley Max Festival. In fact I could have gone, but in the end I chose not to. More about that later.

  One plan that did come to fruition was to get some shopping from Aldi. I hadn't been there for weeks, and they do some stuff that I prefer to buy there rather than Tesco - mostly to do with price differentials. They also do some stuff that Tesco don't do, or have similar enough substitutes. It was a bit late by the time I had washed my hair, and had a shower, but mostly importantly, got a vague idea when my parcel might be delivered, before I walked down to Aldi.

  Top of my shopping list was toilet paper. I was going to buy some the last time I was in Tesco, but forgot about it. Also high on my list was man sized tissues and some laundry detergent. While wandering around in the store I noticed two beers I thought might be interesting. One, a London Porter, I think I have had before, and I can't remember if it was good and bad. A peach flavoured IPA was intriguing. It is the sort of thing that Jodie would be interested in tasting before describing it as minging !

  I also bought some food. Some of it was good healthy stuff like salad leaves and a red cabbage. A couple of things were probably unwise, but they are gone now. One was tempura coated chicken strips. They were sort of nice, but not as good as the picture on the packet suggested. The other (probably) naughty thing was a packet of two Scotch Eggs. They were possibly worse because of their temptation value. I have to admit I scoffed them last night when I most definitely should not have.

  The great find in Aldi was that they have "no added sugar" Dandelion & Burdock drink back. I bought three two litre bottles of it. Even when not fully chilled it is very nice, and I got through over a litre of it yesterday just in the evening. One unusual find was an Italian chilli sauce. It was very strange, and I don't think I enjoy it.

  It was because of assorted damage to my feet, while wearing trainers that were a bit tight, but mostly too stiff because they have not been broken in, that I wore my best hiking boots to Aldi. I have done some very long walks in them without suffering too much foot damage, but thanks to the damage done by the trainers, they did not feel nearly as comfortable as expected. They also seemed slight heavy, and didn't help my gait when walking to and from Aldi. Mostly my legs felt stiff, and I could not walk as freely and as fast as I would have hoped for. In fact I was walking to Aldi no faster than walking home carrying quite a weight of shopping.

  To my great surprise, my parcel from Amazon was delivered at 1.30pm. That left plenty of time to put my feet up for an hour or two before going to Brockley. The trouble was that not only did I have new toys to play with, but after walking to and from Aldi, I didn't think I would enjoy standing around for a couple of hours in Brockley. I guess I'll never know if I missed anything good there.

  My parcel from Amazon contained two items. One was a twin pack of RAM strips totalling 16GB of memory. The other was a 2TB external, USB hard disk. The idea was that I would put the RAM into my spare Dell Optiplex PC, and after swapping hard disks over it would become my main desktop PC. I had bought the spare months ago, possibly last year, and I don't think I had ever turned it on. I bought it because my current PC has an irritating problem. The internal data lines to peripherals were designed incorrectly by Intel. They cross over too many times, and for large, and lengthy data transfers they strangle themselves.

  The problem was amply demonstrated yesterday when I copied my entire picture directory/folder to the new USB hard disk. It started off very fast, but in a few minutes it was just plodding along. During that time the PC was very unresponsive. It was similar to what can happen if you don't have enough RAM memory, but that was not the problem this time. It took 10 or more hours to copy 839GB of data to the external hard disk.

  The spare PC used a different chipset that was said to have cured the data transfer problem. My plan was to put the 16GB of new RAM in there, and fit the two hard drives from my existing PC into it, but there were a few problems. Fitting The RAM would be know problem, but the first indication of it being a cut down, and cheaper PC was that it only had two RAM slots (my current PC can take 4 strips of RAM).

  I took a closer look at what I had bought. One annoying difference is that the spare PC only has half the USB ports as the current PC. That is annoying, but does not make it unusable because although I have assorted cables plugged into the UB ports, only two are constantly in use - the mouse and keyboard. The real deal breaker was that there were on two SATA ports, and with one used the the CD/DVD drive, that only leaves one hard disk that can be connected. One is enough under typical circumstances, but my current PC uses two - one is a very fast solid state drive for the operating system and programs, and the other is a "spinning rust", conventional hard disk for data storage.

  In the end I put the 16GB of new memory in my current PC, and of course it has made no noticeable difference for day to day stuff. I hope it will come into it's own for some memory heavy jobs like video editing, and possibly some intensive picture editing. I then started copying my picture folder/directory to the new USB hard disk. That slowed up everything so much that I couldn't do much, although I was still able to watch the evening Star Treks.

  My intentions for the spare PC is to do a fresh installation on it, and make it dual boot. If I can get a fully working, activated, copy of Windows 7 on it, I will allow that 500GB of the 2GB hard drive I have fitted in it. The other 1.5GB will have Linux Mint 21.1 on it with the Mate desktop. I might try and see if Michael might be interested in it, but being a complete technophobe it is unlikely he will be interested. The other person who might appreciate it could be my friend Kevin. He used to work in the trade, and so used to have a fairly up to date PC. He hasn't work for maybe 15 years now, and I don't know if he has a modern(ish) fast PC or not. Once I have set the PC up and seen how well it performs, I will see if I can tempt anybody.

  I started yesterday with quite a high blood glucose reading, 9.5mmol/l. That is below the red line, but close to it. In theory I should have been very careful with what I ate yesterday, but that was tricky after buying new temping food from Aldi. I guess the Tempura chicken strips were probably not too bad for lunch. Dinner was mostly salad, but I did use a fair dose of the Tesco French dressing which lists sugar as being one of the top ingredients.

  Another doubtful thing was the "rainbow coleslaw in yoghurt". Tesco do something very similar (I think) and I am sure that is very low sugar, but the Aldi version was sweetened. The good thing about the Aldi tubs is that they are bigger, and it is easier to visualise them as two portions instead of like the small pots that Tesco sell where it is so easy just to use the whole amount in one go. The big mistake was after eating the salad was to still feel peckish. That was when I scoffed the two Scotch Eggs as a sort of late dessert.

  There was actually an late evening TV programme on last night. It was Have I Got News For You being shown on BBC1. I had to admit (possibly again) that I really don't know what is going on in the big wild/wide world, and a lot of the stuff on Have I Got New For You, a topical news quiz, didn't really ring any bells ! I don't even know who the presenter was, but she was strangely attractive.

  I went to bed straight after the programme. That finished no later than 10pm (possibly closer to 9.45pm). I read for a while before getting to sleep quite easily sometime before 11pm. I slept well for a couple of hours, but I did have a dream, and it was an "interesting" dream. Of course I woke up before the potentially really interesting bit started. In the dream I seemed to be much younger - maybe as young as 18 years old, although the only clue to this was the way I could run to get a bus.

  I have no idea where the bus I wanted to get came from, or where it went to. All I know is that I just missed it at a stop before the main road. I knew that the bus would ultimately go right at the main road, but it was "no right turn" at the end of the road it was coming out of. It had to turn left, go several hundred down the main road to a mini roundabout where it could rotate round and head down the main road in the right direction. There was no traffic at all on the main road, and so it was easy for me to dash across it, and run down to the next bus stop, just before the bus stopped there.

  I got on the bus and was just about to start climbing up the pole to the upper deck (I have no idea what happened to the stairs, and why the bus operators thought anyone would climb a pole). I was just getting a firm hold on the pole when a voice behind me said "remember me ?". I turned around and recognised a girl I knew from school of college. She was skinny, and rather lanky girl, but is seems she rather liked me.

  We sat down together on a double seat, and she snuggled up against me. I rather liked that. I felt relaxed and bold enough to ask if I could feel her breasts. She said she would like that, but only somewhere more private than a mostly empty bus. She said she would undo her blouse to make it better for me when the time came. As is all too typical in dreams like this, we got off the bus near my house, where we could have true privacy, and I woke up !

  I was awake for maybe 15 minutes. A few minutes for a pee, and the rest of the time story boarding part 2 of the dream - the best bit ! I had the perfect plot all worked out, turned over, fell asleep again, and of course nothing happened. I probably had a dream about being back at work or something, and I forgot such banal stuff 2 minutes after waking up. On the whole it seemed like I slept quite well last night.

  This morning I guess I was surprised to see than my blood glucose reading was only 9.1mmol/l - just a small bit over what I would usually think of as normal usual. I don't think I need to take anything but the usual precautions about what I eat today. Fortunately I have already eaten most of the worst temptations already. That brings me on to the great question of "what shall I do today ?".

  There are no trains today - the second day of a 2 day rail strike (there were no trains yesterday). If I am going out anywhere I am limited to feet or buses, and I don't fancy buses. I am not sure I fancy feet either. I am so out of practice walking that any time I walk even a short distance it rust reminds me how unfit I am, and how the next walk will feel hard. It is a bit of a vicious spiral that needs breaking. Today I should go out for a walk, but I also want to play with computers. I shall just have to see what happens when it happens.