Today seems to be one of those days when details of the expected weather change once an hour when the forecast is revised. What I do know is that when I opened the curtains, maybe a bit before 8am, the road outside was wet after some sort of shower. Right now the sky is very cloudy, but there are gaps in the cloud, and as I write this the sun is shining. The latest revision to the forecast shows light rain at 1pm, heavy rain at 3pm, and back to light rain at 4pm, plus sunny spells for 2pm, full sunshine for 5pm, and then more sunny spells for 6 and 7pm. Of course these predictions are just fantasy, and reality is more than likely to be very different. Of course the BBC give a very different forecast - sunny spells from 1pm to 6pm, and then a single hour of light rain at 7pm. The one thing that is usually right is the temperature. The Met Office say 22° C, and the BBC say 23° C. Tomorrow should be bright, although mostly just sunny spells, and the temperature may be 23° C.

  Yesterday involved a lot of waiting, even for things I didn't know I would be waiting for, and not much else. It was a very unproductive day. The good thing was that the first wait was to get first notification of a delivery slot for the delivery of a case of 12 bottles of hot Caribbean pepper sauce.

  I only had to wait until 9:15am for a notification, by text message, that my delivery slot would be between 10:32am and 11:32am. It was actually delivered not that long after 10:32am - maybe no longer than 5 or 10 minutes later. The only slightly negative thing is that it confirmed the Amazon despatch email. I had intended to order two cases, and I thought I had, but as the email from Amazon said, it was just a single case. Oh well, that is enough to keep me happy for over a month, and maybe over two months. and it is easy to order more.

 It was at 11:28am when I was notified another Amazon order, or at least part of one, would be delivered yesterday. It was a lens hood for my Canon 75 to 300mm zoom lens.  To my surprise it was delivered quite early in the afternoon, sometime not long after 1pm (although I can't remember the exact time). I was also surprised that for the first time ever Amazon provided some very useful, even if ultimately inaccurate info on their tracking web page.
  When I hit the save button for the above screenshot the delivery was actually pulling up outside my house, and not just over half a mile as shown on the map. When I first saw this form of tracking map it was just after I was informed the van had left the depot. The little van symbol was shown with it's front just hanging over the edge of The River Thames, but it did give the useful information of "just 5 stops to go". I doubted that was accurate, and it later seemed not to be, but it was encouraging.

  When the lens hood arrived I couldn't wait to try it on the lens itself. I couldn't remember just which lens it was for (I actually ordered 4 different lens hoods for various lenses). I tried it on all lenses without lens hoods already attached, and it didn't fit any one them ! A brief internet search showed that the lens hood I had ordered was for the Canon 75-300mm zoom lens mk3, and my lens was the mk2. The major difference is that the mk3 has an ultrasonic focus motor faster focusing, and the minor, but actually more important difference was the diameter, and fixing of where the lens hood is attached.

  On the face of it, it seems I have wasted my money (and they are not cheap for a few pence of moulded plastic), but maybe not. I know the mk3 lens is considerably more expensive than the mk2. I bought the mk2 because it suited my needs, and being semi obsolete was available far cheaper. What I think I can do is to use some hot melt glue to attach the new lens hood to a filter glass (probably a UV filter because you can lave those on under any conditions).

  Two things: I have just checked and the size of a UV filter for this lens is a fair bit smaller diameter than the lens hood fitting, and my idea of glueing the two together seems very unlikely. Also during the short break I took from writing this I have looked up the prices of these Canon lenses. I have found one reduced from £225 to just £89.99, and it is the mk3 version ! I don't think I need to buy a third lens covering the same range. I already have the mk2 Canon lens, and a nice Sigma lens. I do have a rubber, foldable lens hood I can use on the Canon or Sigma lens. The trouble with the rubber lens hoods is that after a while the rubber splits where it folds. I already have one lens hood where I glued a plastic lens hood that didn't fit on the lens I bought it for, that I glued to the remains of a rubber lens hood. I suspect I will do the same when the rubber one eventually splits. (It is the last survivor of about 5 I bought in the past 0 they are very flimsy !).

  With the lens hood delivered I thought I could think about doing other stuff, but then I got a message from Michael. He is not around tomorrow because he has to pick his wife up from a short stay in Brighton, and so he was going shopping in Tesco yesterday. He asked if I would like the usual 4 bottles of Diet Coke he usually gets me on Thursday. I said "yes please" and then had to wait for him to drop it round on his way back from Tesco.

  By then it was getting a bit late to go out, but there was also the better excuse that I wasn't feeling in good form to go out. Although I had gone to the toilet in the morning I was still feeling very mildly constipated. That was probably not the actual case because my food intake the day before was such that it should not have been a surprise that a small amount in=a small amount out. I still felt like something could still happen - and possibly at short notice. It didn't.

  Constipation, or more likely not constipation was one negative thing. There was worse, and by early it was annoying me enough to take a couple of Paracetamol tablets. It was a pain centred around my right shoulder. It radiated some way down my right arm, and some across my upper back, and also down and partly under my right breast. It is not a new thing, but maybe because I slept awkwardly, or something, it was unusually bad yesterday.

  A week or two I was chatting with my next door neighbour, and he was telling me about a very similar condition he had. He said that the physiotherapist in the hospital said it was torn muscle connected to the shoulder blade (I think), and many of the aches were other muscles compensating for it. I am not aware of anything I have done that could have caused muscle damage unless it was a legacy of picking up, and carrying, some incredibly heavy TVs when I used to repair them 20 years ago. My neighbour said the physiotherapy, and exercises prescribed, helped a lot, but he is now on very strong Tramadol, pain killers.

  After Michael had dropped the Diet Cokes off, and we had a brief chat, I could finally rest and do nothing. I read for a while, but the time for the first Star Trek of the evening, 5pm, was looming up fast. I started watching the first Star Trek, The New Generation, and considered what I was going to have for dinner. I could have knocked up a quick salad, or even had some tins of soup, but I fancied something more.

  I realised I fancied a kebab. On the one hand I seem to be ordering takeaways too often lately, but on the other hand I did have some money off vouchers for one place I had patronised 5 times in the pasty. The "vouchers" was actually 5 Just eat "stamps" for just this particular kebab emporium. I ended up buying three different kebabs, each of which could possibly be a complete dinner, and with the discount for ordering more than £20 worth, and using the "stamps" my entire order was just £17. At that price I felt no guilt.

  However I did feel some guilt because one of those three items was doner meat and chips with salad. It was very naughty, but very nice. It was also a "regular" sized portion rather than large, and it didn't come with a teetering pile of chips. In fact the amount of chips was very small. Maybe it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. Of course the "mystery" doner meat is very fatty, and probably has an unhealthy amount of salt in it, but what the hell ! I enjoyed it.

  I stayed up late enough to watch a QIXL that started at 9pm, and finished at 10pm. I was in bed, and probably asleep by 10:30pm. I seemed to fall asleep quickly, and I seemed to get some long, 3 or even 4 hour bits of uninterrupted sleep, and yet for some reason I felt I didn't sleep well. Maybe it is because I woke a bit after 4am, perhaps just as it was starting to get light outside, and then it seemed to take ages to get back to sleep (although those "ages" was very subjective and the reality may have been less than 15 minutes).

  One thing that suggests I didn't sleep that badly is that this morning my shoulder doesn't seem to be too bad. It's not completely pain free, but unless I provoke it I find it is completely ignorable for most of the time. I know, at least I believe I know that I had many dreams last night, but at this time I can't seem to recall anything at all about them - not even a the subject of any of them.

  There is some almost good news this morning. Although I ate quite moderately during the day, I still expected the chips, eaten at around 6pm, would have a bad effect on my blood glucose this morning. They did, but it wasn't that bad an effect. My new blood glucose meter said 8.8mmol/l - a little high, but nothing to worry about. The old meter said 9.1mmol/l. Any reading in the nines is higher than I like, bit not that uncommon lately, but still comfortable below the "red line" at 10.0mmol/l. It is possible that the two big cans of Stella Artois may have helped to raise my blood glucose readings as well.

  Today I have been to the toilet, and passed a fair amount, but I still don't think it is enough. However, I think it is probably safe to visit the pub at lunchtime. My favourite barmaid. Ayse, should be back from her holidays today, and it will be nice to see her. There is no chance that Angela will join us, but I still hope she will start coming to the pub when she is back at work in August.