The sun is now shining, but it is slightly hazy because there is still enough thin cloud to make the sky more white than blue. This morning was another cool morning, just 11° C, but the forecast says it should rise to 21° C by mid afternoon. One small change in the latest revision of the forecast is that 10am is shown as dull, but 11am is now shown as full sunshine. That sunshine should continue until sunset. Tomorrow morning may start a whole degree less cool at 12° C, and another day of almost full sunshine could raise the afternoon temperature to 23° C. Saturday could see 27° C. The Met Office say light showers for Saturday, and the BBC say thundery showers ! I wonder which forecast will come closest to reality ?

  I didn't enjoy much of yesterday. I was feeling fairly rotten a lot of the time, and sometimes it was physically rotten, and sometimes mentally rotten. It was probably my negative mental and physical feeding off each other. I can think of a selection of possible reasons why my day should start this way, and once started, to only very slowly fade away.

  There can be no doubt about it, but it felt like I woke up with a hangover yesterday morning. I don't consider I drunk that much when I was out the night before, and I think if I had been drunk I would not have skipped dinner. It is more likely I would have gone in the kebab shop next to the pub. There is a tiny bit of a possibility that one of the beers was off. one did have a slightly musty taste, but I have tasted worse with no obvious after effects.

  One unusual thing was that after seeing the money owed on my electricity bill, I decided not to use any heating yesterday, and the the day before. I was sometimes cold in the night when I had kicked the duvet aside because I felt uncomfortable under it. As I mentioned yesterday, I put on my winter clothes yesterday morning, and only dropped down to just a short sleeved t-shirt later in the day.

  Another thing I mentioned yesterday was that I wanted to try a bit harder to lose a bit of weight. I think I mentioned that one line of thought was that I was concentrating too much on sugar content, and sometimes ignoring calorie content. In the morning I had a double helping of instant noodles. That was instantly wrong, but I wanted something warm in me because I was feeling so cold (the thermometer in my room said it was only just 20° C. That sounds like it should be warm enough, but I have noted many times that my comfort level starts at just over 22° C. That is only 2° higher, but it seems to make a difference.

  One thing I did in the morning was part happy, and part sad, and probably most annoying. I logged into my bank, and inspected my bank balance. It was as healthy as I hoped, and that meant that it was no hardship to pay about £450 as the combined amount owing for my gas and electricity. "No hardship" does not equal happy though. I was semi amused by the next page of the paying process on the banks web pages......

 I regard the amount I pay for my energy bills to be a complete scam. I sometimes think I am paying haying half for the energy, and half to enrich the shareholders of the energy companies. If there was ever an industry that needs to be nationalised it is energy suppliers. A free market economy may be fine for things that are optional, but domestic energy is essential, and get rich quick speculators should play no part in it.

  I still had some time after doing my bank business before I was going to go out for a couple of pints of Guinness in The Jolly Farmers. The first thing I did was to put a couple of individual steak and craft ale pies in the oven. I was going to have them after getting back from the pub, and they would be followed by a nice snooze - hopefully in a nice warm bedroom if the afternoon did feature strong sunshine as originally forecast.

  I still had something like 20 minutes before I was going to go out, and to take my mind off feeling cold, I decided it was high time I made a start on entering the details and pictures of the trains I had "spotted" on my day out on Monday. I had delayed doing it because I was not sure I could correctly identify some of then trains I had photographed, but once I started it didn't seem to be so hard after all. It went smoothly enough that I ignored the time and just carried on doing the job until I was finished.

  When I was finished I could still have gone to the pub, and I could still have got there not long after 1pm - maybe as late as 1.30pm, not that time really mattered. I could have gone at any time in the afternoon, but I was drawn to another course - the pies I had been cooking. The picture on the packet, and the basic description made them seem like they would be really nice. Sadly the reality was that the filling was just brown gloop with one or two lumps that were allegedly meat. They weren't nasty in any way, and I think bland sums them up best.

  As planned, albeit with a different start, I had my snooze after eating the pies. Laying on my bed provided extra thick insulation on my back, and that helped a lot to make me feel warm. There was one other, rather brief time, when I felt better than warm. That was when I brought in some washing that I have not mentioned until now. It was just one t-shirt and 5 pairs of underpants. I washed them in the morning, and hung them in the line to dry. When I brought them in, almost in the early evening, the sun was out, and shining into my garden (although the left of the garden was in deep shadow). My washing felt warm and very dry, and the sun on my back felt deliciously hot. If only it had been low enough to shine through my bedroom windows it would have got very warm in there, instead of barely tolerable.

  To pass some extra time I went back to a job I started some time ago. It was to copy the contents of recordable optical disks (CD and DVD) to hard drive. Many of the disks didn't even have protective sleeves, and the original pile was about a foot tall. I have whittled it down a lot, and did more yesterday. Some of the disks were home made DVDs. I must have had the original avi files that I made them with, but it seems they may have been lost over the years.

  In most cases I would have made the DVD for ease of playing through my TV, but they were just taking up too much room, and as I mentioned, many didn't have any protective sleeves and were prone to damage. A couple of disks converted to mp4 files slowly, but easily. One film was recorded on my set top DVD recorder. That thing was not very good. On attempting to "close" the disk (once no more video was to be recorded on it) it would often ruin the whole disk. Without closing the disk it was unplayable on anything except the original recorder.

  However, I once discovered that Handbrake did have a way of reading, and converting those disks if you pointed it at the raw device rather than the mounted device. I successfully converted a Spanish (with English dubbing) film that seemed like it was very boring, to a mp4 file using Handbrake. Maybe I might even try watching it one day to see if it is as bad as I think it probably is. It is about a man who is very lucky - almost, but not quite a SciFi film.

  Two other disks I had made from lost avi files were series 6 and 7 of the long running BBC comedy Allo Allo. In some moods I thought Allo Allo was very funny, and in other moods I thought it a load of piffle ! The second disk, with the 8 episodes of series 7, I had to leave running overnight because it was getting well past my bedtime. Hearing the DVD drive in my PC was sometimes like hearing a mouse gnawing away at something.

  Before describing my night I ought to mention my dinner, and my mid afternoon snack. I am not sure that "depressed" is a suitable word for how I felt for a lot of yesterday, but I certainly didn't feel any Joie de vivre. Yesterday afternoon I thought "bugger it" and ate a big bag of beef and horseradish crisps to provide a bit of cheer. Later on I thought I had better take it easy when having dinner. I started with a small tub of coleslaw and a small pack of flavoured, sliced, pre-cooked, chicken breast. The coleslaw was a bit of a dubious choice, but I thought it was relatively safe. I then wanted a dessert, and I ate a small tub of low calorie/sugar ice cream. It wasn't the wisest choice, but it was delicious.

  I was surprised how late it was when I went to bed. It was actually dark outside, and that made it around 10pm. It was my second night with no heating on at all, and I fared better last night. Mostly I seemed to sleep OK, but I did have one unpleasant dream, and I can't think of what could have inspired it.  I was in a house, and judging by the decor it maybe have been in the 1940s. I have no idea of my relation to the other characters - not that I saw all the characters in the dream.

  I feel sure the build up was a lot longer than the small bit I remember. The climax of the dream was when someone said that as a wedding present for a bride to be they would sort out her teeth. I know that once upon a time, it was not an uncommon gift because dentistry was (as it is now) extremely expensive for restorative work - if indeed it was even possible. The idea was to have all teeth pulled, and dentures provided. It actually happened when my dad signed up for the RAF at the start of WW2. The only problem in the dream was that I learned that no dentist would be involved, and her two burly, easy end born brothers would hold her down as they used pliers to extract the teeth. I did not want to see (or hear) this taking place, and the last bit of the dream was finding away to slip away unnoticed. It was a relief to wake up at that point.

  I don't recall any other dreams last night. One of the strange things last night was how little I peed. There was one time I woke up and went to the toilet thinking I needed to pee, but it was evident there was little need for it. The significant thing about this, plus the fact I drank very little in the night, was that it suggested my blood glucose was nice and low. Of course I knew that to me almost impossible after all I ate yesterday. I guess I was lucky that it was as low as 9.3mmol/l - a lot higher than desired, but still in the just about safe zone.

  I think only one thing of note is happening today. This afternoon I expect I'll be joined by Jodie and Michael for a beer drinking/tasting session. Other than that, I had a bit of washing up to do, and maybe some light housework. I may even fit in copying a few more CD/DVDs to files to store on external, USB, hard drives.