It seems certain that there will be some rain today, and probably in the afternoon. The forecast for light rain at 8am may still be possible, but sunny spells seem more likely. Just to confuse things, the latest revision of the forecast shows no afternoon rain (as in the screenshot above), and moves all the action to the morning. It currently shows light rain for 9 and 10am, and a thunderstorm at 11am. It is always useful to see what the BBC says in these situations. At 7am they said it would rain between midday and 4pm, and that 2, 3 and 4pm may feature thunderstorms. The latest revision still shows three hours of thunderstorms, but they are now predicted to start an hour earlier. It is looking like we may well get a thunderstorm today, but no one seems to know when it will happen. The one thing agreed upon is that the afternoon high will be 26° C. Both forecasters seem to agree that tomorrow will be dry and sunny, and the afternoon temperature will be 26° C.   Yesterday was less good than the day before, but on the whole it wasn't bad. Maybe the most positive thing I did all day was to wash two white t-shirts, and a white hand towel, and had them drying on the washing line while the sun was still shining. I decided it might be prudent to bring them in, just very slightly damp in a few places, when the sky clouded over, and a thunderstorm was predicted (and which never happened).

  After such a terrible night's sleep during the previous night, I didn't feel inclined to rush around a lot, but one thing I did do was to take the heater out of my bedroom, and bring in a desk fan. It helped to make it feel cooler in my very hot bedroom, but despite trying to be as lazy as possible, I didn't manage to have a snooze during the morning. I was still v ery lazy, and didn't have a shower until almost 1pm.
  The delightful cooling blast of a desk fan blowing at my bed (when I took this picture). A very fast shutter speed, because of the intense sunlight coming through the windows, has almost frozen the fan blades, but I can assure you they were spinning very fast !

  Later in the afternoon Jodie came over for a beer tasting session. It was not a good session. It got off to a bad start when Jodie brought 3 cans of Radler with her. Radler seems to be the posh name for Lemonade, often with other fruit flavourings. The first one she opened was lemon and cherry flavour. I only had a small taste, maybe a third of a pint, because as I expected, it was full of sugar. I let Jodie drink the other two tins while I had a can of Guinness, and a bottle of Pilsner.

  One thing we were going to do yesterday, and did actually achieve, was to order a box of beers for delivery in the next few days. It was not a smooth process. The lack of sleep, plus that sort of edginess some of us get with even a possible approaching thunderstorm, the sky to the south was looking very threatening at that time, made me feel very impatient. Jodie got up the same web site up on her phone as I got on my PC.

  The big trouble was that for some reason, Jodie could not see that most of her selections were marked as out of stock on the PC. It was all getting rather tense, but we did finally make an order, and it even included a few things I selected, and will probably like. I am not so sure I will like many of Jodie's choices. It make me feel a bit cheated because I paid for it all. We finished the order just in time for Jodie to get her train to meet Alan in The Three Hounds near Clockhouse station.

  Earlier on, while Jodie was immersed in her phone, I prepared my dinner. It was basically a two cheese salad. On the whole it should have been very healthy, but it had too many baby plumb tomatoes in it. I wanted to use them up because they had been in the fridge for a week, and some of them were getting a bit soft. I think it might be safer for me not to buy tomatoes in future because they can have a lot of sugar in them, and maybe the small ones are worst for it.

  I would normally eat my dinner watching TV, but I can't recall if I found anything I could watch even for 20 minutes. I do remember I did check all the channels. If I did watch something it must have been more bland than watching the test card, and nothing left a mark on my memory. I think it more likely that I read some stuff off the internet while I ate. It must have been about 7.30pm when I suddenly realised I was bored. Had it been mid winter I would have gone to bed to sleep, but I went onto my bed to read from a big, thick, science fiction omnibus book.

 That book is of "modern" science fiction short, or medium short stories, and it is sometimes good and sometimes bad. The omnibus compiler/author heaped praise on the short story I was trying to read last night, but I found the writing style to be turgid in the extreme. I suspect that once the plot is revealed it might make some sort of sense, but I have doubts I will try to read this story to the end. I am close to the end of the book, and I guess a third of the stories were almost as bad as this, and maybe a third were really good. The middle third was neither good nor bad.

  I started feeling very sleepy at about 8.30pm. I had the desk fan on, and I was not feeling too hot. It seemed like a good time to put the book down, and go to sleep. Unfortunately, once the light was off, and I was laying in my usual sleeping position, the thing I became most aware of was how some bits of me were hot and sticky, and other bits felt chilled by the fan. I'm not sure when it was, 10pm is my best guess, I got up again for a short while.

  I checked the weather forecasts, and my own thermometers, and I could see the temperature dropping, but not very much. One or the other forecast was predicting thunderstorms for later today, and the other wasn't. I set the desk fan to sweep from side to side, but the mechanism kept sticking at one position. I was hoping it would be less chilling to have a sweep of air over me instead on full in the face wind.

  I guess I did get to sleep around 11pm, and I probably got quite a few good sleeps last about 2 hours each during the night. I had to leave the fan off for most of the night because it felt too cold, but without it I was sweating quite a lot. I think I woke up more times to switch my pillow around (plus the hand towel over it to soak up some of the sweat) than I woke up to pee. I can remember maybe twice I went to the toilet out of habit instead of need, and stood there waiting for something to happen. Usually it was eventually just a very small pee.

  One peculiar thing happened just after it got light, around 4am. I was dreaming about doing something, although I can't remember what, and someone kept shouting "faster, faster". It got very boring after a while and I woke up just in time to hear the transition from faster to caw caw. It sounded like there were a a couple of magpies having an early morning conversation with each other almost outside my window. I did have one other dream that was quite similar, but this time someone seemed to be shouting "do it, do it".

  I do remember the punch line of another dream, although the details are a bit muddy. I seemed to be watching a succession of envelopes of photographs going past on a sort of moving line. Somewhere, somehow, they were being scanned for child porn, and if detected they were automatically, like a train going over points, shunted to a round carousel from where they were supposed to be tipped into a fire. The trouble was they kept getting stuck, and no one wanted to touch the cursed envelopes for fear of leaving fingerprints or something. This is where your hero stepped forward with a 6ft broom handle, and used that to tip the envelopes into the fire from a safe distance.

  This morning my blood glucose has gone up a little to 9.5mmol/l. I could, and to some extent do, blame the tomatoes and the radler drink, but another reason came to me. "I have seen this before", I thought to myself. That small increase, and maybe a [art reason for the last few morning's less, but still high reading, could be nothing more than dehydration. I was most definitely sweating a lot last night as my soggy pillows adequately demonstrate. The only thing I can do about it is to take a pint of chilled water to bed with me tonight, and guzzle that down. Of course the flaw in my plan is that I'll probably wee it all out before I get to take tomorrow's blood glucose reading.  Maybe I'll just have to trust that everything is under control, and carry on as normal.

  Now we, once again, come up against the great enigma of what I am going to do today. I think a trip to Tesco should happen today, and preferably while it is still dry. Incidently it is bright sunshine at the moment, and it seems The BBC weather forecast come closer to reality at the moment. The Met Office have dropped their warning of light rain for 9 and 10am, and have just substituted light cloud for the light rain. I can see quite a lot of blue sky. They still insist there will be a thunderstorm at 11am, and the BBC say the first thunderstorm will be at 1pm. It seems very likely there is going to be a thunderstorm some time today. Actually, a light sprinkle of rain would be good for the gardens, and maybe just a light sprinkle is the worst we will get.

  I still don't know whether to do anything outside apart from a trip to Tesco. A bit of walking, or even walking up and down stairs to railway platforms, would be useful, and much needed exercise. My walk back from Angela's BBQ was living proof of that - despite having some enjoyable moments, and the high of finishing it, it was far harder work than was good. On the other hand, I do have some indoor video transferring and editing work to do.......