Even the BBC weather forecast, which tends to be more generous with sunny spells (or heavy rain and thunderstorms !) admit that today is likely to be a bit dull a lot of the time. It seems the best we can hope for is a few sunny spells during the morning, and maybe as little as one sunny spell in the early evening. The middle of the day seems to be definitely dull, but dry. I hope later revisions of the forecast, or even reality itself, ends up being brighter. The highest temperature today will probably be 22° C. Tomorrow could start very dull, but still dry, and with some sunny spells later in the day. On the other hand, The BBC forecast has thrown in a thunderstorm at 4pm ! Once again the temperature tomorrow will probably peak at 22° C, although maybe 23° C might be possible.

  Yesterday was dominated by waiting in for a delivery from Amazon. This time their website didn't budge from just saying "before 9pm" rather than give any useful information. Other couriers let you track their vans, and suggest an hour slot when delivery is most likely - and as far as I can remember, none have ever slipped outside that hour, although some have come close to it, but even then, I think they have arrived earlier instead of later.

  A lot of yesterday was quite boring. One thing I did do before midday, when I was 100% certain my Amazon order would not arrive, was to do a bit of laundry. It was just a single white t-shirt, pale blue t-shirt , and a pair of underpants. Both t-shirts had some stains, and it seemed an ideal time to test the Tesco "Bio" detergent that I bought a week or so ago. I am happy to report that it smells a lot better than the nasty smelling Aldi Bio detergent, and it could almost be described as nice.

  It sort of worked to bring out the stains in the t-shirts, but the pale blue one also has "stains" that are actually paler patches where some bleach got splashed on it. The white t-shirt has what I think are rust stains, and they are only very slowly starting to fade, and may never fade completely, but at least the rest of the t-shirt is brilliant white !

  With the laundry done I could have relaxed, but I still wanted to be alert for a ring at the doorbell. It was a very boring time, and at 20 past 2pm I even resorted to checking my blood pressure for something to do. I try to do it twice a day anyway, but that is usually done with the meter that clips on the wrist. This time I used the big machine with the upper arm cuff.  111/62 suggests my pills are working mostly OK. Maybe if I had taken a few readings, and tried to relax more, I could have got that Diastolic pressure a bit lower. The colours to the right of teh display say low (purple), ideal (green), pre high (amber) and red (high). My reading was on the border between green and amber - not too bad, but could be better.

  One thing I don't think I did was to over eat because of boredom. I am very sure I had lunch, and I think it was ham and lettuce on rice cakes (with a squirt of mayo to stop the lettuce falling off). I seem to recall also eating a handful of peanuts at some time. I waited until 6pm before I had my dinner. Before getting to that, there is one picture I took on Sunday I forgot to show yesterday.
  There were rail replacement buses running on Sunday because engineering works meant there was no train service from Lewisham to Hayes (Kent). I have never had a need to use a rail replacement bus, and in fact have shunned the idea. Therefore I have rarely seen just what sort of bus they are. On Sunday evening I noticed a strange bus outside the pub, and went out to investigate. It was a sort of pale beige colour, and as can be seen it was just a single decker bus. It was also almost empty. At that time of the evening a train could be almost busy taking people home after a day out in London. Many people would just use an ordinary red bus to travel onwards to Ladywell and Catford from Lewisham. Many people just wouldn't have bother to go out with a full rail service.
It was probably about 5.30pm, my sausages for dinner were in the mini oven/grill cooking, and I couldn't wait any longer for the three boxes of Guinness I was expecting to be delivered. I wouldn't have drunk any of the Guinness without cooling, or ideally, chilling it, but I did have four vans of Stella Artois nicely chilled in the fridge, and I thought "why not ?". One reason why not was that I was worried that Stella might have a high sugar content. I limited myself to just one, and maybe that made it even more enjoyable.
  I had barely drunk a mouthful of Stella before the man from Amazon arrive, a minute before 6pm, with my cases of Guinness - 45 cans in total. At that point everything else stopped while I got the cases out of the cardboard boxes they had shipped in, and took the picture. Then the next thing was to eat my sausage salad - literally just grilled sausages with a heap of salad leaves and a generous squirt of mayonnaise. I also sprinkled some white pepper on the sausages. It was a strange but nice dinner.

  I watched my usual three Star Treks last night, but with a small difference. Star Trek: Enterprise had reached the end of it's run last Friday, and has been replaced by Merlin. I don't know what that is all about, and I don't want to. I switched channel from "Pick" to "legend" and watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - the Star Trek with the least likeable episodes. It is quite curious how the episodes can lurch between brilliant and dreadful - with the latter being a bit more common.

  I think even Star Trek: Voyager was a bit dull despite it containing lots of high drama, but then again, like Deep Space Nine, I never really developed much empathy for most of the characters. I was getting a bit fidgety while it was showing, and while I don't think I walked away from the screen, my mind was often on other things. One thing I was thinking about was networking my main PC to the PC in the dining room that is mostly used as a music player. Until last night I used to transfer the odd file by putting it on a thumb drive, and taking that between PCs.

  As soon as Star Trek Voyager finished I went down to the dining room, and set up file transfer on the dining room table PC. Unfortunately I could not find the adminstration program for the server, and had to try and configure it by hand. I was successful in that I can transfer stuff between the two PCs but only as a single user. It would be handy to have a new user name and password just for file transfers. I will look into it a bit more today, but it is working well enough for the moment.

  I did watch one more TV programme last night. It was QI on between 9 and 10pm. It was almost a very good episode, but was mildly let down by some idiot as one of the guests/panellists (or whatever they call them). He was far too young to participate in the adult humour of the rest of the guests and Stephen Fry.

  At 10pm I headed to bed for some much needed sleep. I say it was much needed by the speed at which I fell asleep after turning out the lights. I didn't have enough to to completely think through the notion "am I ever going to get to sleep" before I was fast asleep. it was a strange night with quite a selection of dreams, and some had a very strange common thread, and it was that I seemed to be in India.

  The key dream to all this was that I dreamed that our rotten to the core government had outsourced Greenwich Mean time to India. For some unknown reason I was there when they started work. I would have expected them to be using some sort of computer to do whatever they were supposed to do (GMT doesn't really need administration - it just is ! (The real time keeping is done by atomic clocks, and their accuracy is determined by physics, although astronomers the world over are still checking the predictions of, for instance, sunrise and sunset).

  The Indians made it a very heavy administration task, and insisted the best way was to write a ledger, by hand, that ended up 3 inches thick. It is odd how I watched the dream just passively, and I could almost imagine my brain making it all up as I dreamed. Quite how I could have imagined that is unlikely to ever be known. A couple more dreams seemed to be set in India. One had something to do with lottery tickets, and I don't think I can recall any details for others.

  I woke up what I consider to be far to early this morning (about 5.15am). Curiously enough, I did sort of feel refreshed, and felt fairly good. I went for the pee that probably woke me up, and then I went back to bed determined to sleep an extra hour. Another curious thing is it was almost exactly an hour later when I woke up again. this time I felt almost groggy, and bits of me seemed hurt or felt stiff and creaky.

  There was some good news though. My new blood glucose meter read 8.1mmol/l and the old one 8.4mmol/l. It is nice when both meters give a very similar reading. It gives some sort of faith that the reading is credible. Both figures are less than my typical monthly average which is running at about 8.7mmol/l for the first 6 months of the year Last year it was closer to 8.5mmol/l. It does seem that despite a few times when I have had much higher readings, I am still controlling my sugar intake well.

  Now I've had breakfast, a bowl of instant noddles, as usual, I am feeling a lot batter compared to when I first got up. The only negative thing at the moment is that I would appear to be constipated, or at least "not regular" so far this morning. it does feel like something will happen sooner or later. I just hope it is not between 10:32 and 11:32am when I am expecting another parcel delivery. This one is being couriered by DPD, and they do provide good and accurate tracking. Once my package, containing a dozen bottles of hot Caribbean sauce is delivered I will be free to do anything. If I am no longer constipated by, say, midday, I might go for a walk, or even do some train spotting. It is likely to be too dull outside to do either with any great satisfaction, but I'll probably give something a go.