Today could be another rather dull day with the added negativity of some rain around 10 and 11am according to the latest revision to the forecast. We seem to be going through a very vague period of weather where things can change a lot in as little as an hour. The temperature forecast has stayed the same for some time, and it seem that the high today will be 22° C, but maybe for a solitary hour. The BBC forecast doesn't show the brief blip of 22° C, and says most of the late afternoon will be 21° C. It also says that there could be some sunny spells after 6pm. Tomorrow, a significant day because it is the first day of Chattfest, a small scale rock festival in the large garden of The Chatterton Arms pub in Bromley, is looking like it could be quite damp. Both the BBC and Met Office say that it will rain, but they can't agree on the times ! It should be a mild day with the temperature around 21° C.

  I'm taking the unusual step in writing this in spare time last night, rather than in the morning as usual. It is an experiment to see if I can finish writing a lot earlier in the morning, and so have time to do other possible things, although today (or tomorrow as I write this) is a day when I expect to mostly rest in preparation for two very busy days on Saturday and Sunday - the days when I hope to be at Chattfest by early afternoon until potentially at last as 8pm. I'll write the final words about what will be yesterday, and tomorrow morning, tomorrow morning. (All these mixed tenses get complicated, but I hope you can follow what I am trying to say.

  Yesterday was quite a good day, or perhaps "satisfying" is a better description. I managed to finish writing in time to allow an unintended snooze before I washed and got ready to go out shopping to Aldi. The walk to Aldi was uneventful with no real aches or creakings, but I did feel slightly uncomfortable. I hate to say it, but it seems I was partly constipated again. I did go a bit, but it was surely not enough.

  There were a couple of clues as to what the problem was. It seems I might have been a bit dehydrated. I did note that the wee I had before going out was a little bit dark in colour. It is my intention of drinking a lot of water this evening, where, because I am writing this yesterday "this evening" will be last night and not tonight..... I am having second thoughts about trying to write this in the right tense, and maybe if I do this again it would be better to split this entry into two halves - one written the evening before, and containing all the stuff from earlier in the day, and than a second half actually written in the morning as usual....but for now prepare for both of us to be confused

  While shopping in Aldi I made a point of buying a fair amount of semi long life stuff, such as cheese and packaged ham, but I did buy other stuff, and some of it was probably not a good idea, and rather unhealthy. When you add on stuff like toilet paper, spare bottles of balsamic salad dressing, as well as quite a lot of drinks, it all added up to quite a lot. It was also rather expensive, although is less to do with how much I bought and more to do with the rocketing cost of living since Brexit.

  It wasn't long after I got home that I started on some tasty, but unhealthy stuff. I had a small snack of a chunk of cheese, or something similar while I waited for 4 lamb with mint kebabs on sticks cooked in the mini oven/grill. They were riddled with fat. Cooking loosened some of that fat, but they must still have been very unhealthy. However, they were rather nice, although perhaps the after taste was not so good, and interfered with the beer I was tasting later in the afternoon.

  I did very little for the start of the afternoon. I think I even had a snooze for a short while. I guess it is a facet of getting older but I do seem to find having a snooze can be annoyingly easy sometimes. I had to, and did wake up before 3:30pm for a Thursday afternoon beer tasting session. Normally it would be with Jodie, but she had a Beer Festival in the Beckenham Rugby Club to go to. I declined the option of going too, and just had a quiet drink with Michael.

  Well I say a "quiet drink" but a lot of music was involved, and Michael was talking ten to the dozen as usual. It was still a nice couple of hours, and with no Jodie I could select music that both Michael and myself would like. One bit of music was a classic blues CD that I acquired from somewhere or another many years ago. At About 6pm Michael left, and I started to prepare my dinner.

  I almost survived eating a lot of Polish Sourdough bread the day before, and maybe my high blood glucose readings were partly caused by dehydration. The truth of that will maybe be revealed when I do my blood glucose readings this morning (aka tomorrow morning as I write this). My intention tonight is to try and drink a lot of chilled water (because I can easily drink a lot of water if it is well chilled), and hopefully it will cure my constipation, and make for a lower blood  glucose reading.

  As I write this, last night, or the night before I publish the whole thing, I once again feel a bit bloated. I feel I should have resisted any dinner, but habits die hard. I think I had two small sandwiches for the main part of my dinner, and I followed that with my second to last (Tesco seem to have run out of new stock) of the low calorie and low sugar ice cream that I seem to tolerate really well. Not long to go now, and I'll be in bed.

  (Now writing in the morning as per convention). I was in bed around 9pm, but I felt very uncomfortable. Almost as soon as I laid down I started to suffer from heart burn. A couple of antacid tablets helped calm that down a bit. I still felt very bloated, and very uncomfortable. I think it was around 10:30pm, after I had started to pass a lot of wind, that I went to the toilet. Initially nothing happened, but then, suddenly, almost like uncorking a champagne bottle, I most definitely "open my bowels". I immediately felt a bit better, and a second visit to the toilet 10 minutes later made another small improvement.

  As well as everything else, I was also belching a lot. That made drinking all the chilled water I intended to drink difficult. Although a lot more comfortable, I still felt a bit uncomfortable, but I did manage to get to sleep before midnight. From then on I seemed to sleep quite well, but after the few times I woke up for a pee, it did seem to take some time to get back to sleep again. I have a vague recollection of quite a few dreams last night, but the best remembered, and most significant was about tomorrow's Chattfest.

  I dreamed it was around 1pm tomorrow, and I had just arrived at the entrance to the mini festival. I remember it was a very bland, sort of light grey day. The entrance was rather similar to the entrance to the lorry park in Catford, rather than through The Chatterton Arms pub. There were two men there selling the tickets, and those tickets looked more like a folded red identity card. I was among maybe a dozen people, and they included Angela who completely ignored me, waiting to get in when it was declared that all tickets had been sold, and we were all turned away.

  It is possible that I might get there tomorrow or Sunday and find all tickets really have been sold. On the other hand if it does turn out to be as wet as the most pessimistic forecasts suggest, the place could well be very undersold. Anyway, the dream seemed unpleasant enough to make it worth waking up, and with it gone 7am, to get up. The first thing I did was to go to the toilet, and to confirm that I definitely wasn't constipated !

  The next thing, as is long standing routine now, was to check my blood glucose. I had reasons to think it could be very high, but also reasons to think that maybe it might be fairly low. This morning was one of those times when the potential inaccuracy of blood glucose meters was adequately demonstrated because both my theories and hopes were proved. From the same bead of blood, applied to the test strips within little more than a second apart, I got two very different readings. The new meter gave a nice low reading of 8.3mmol/l, and the old meter gave a very high reading of 9.6mmol/l.

  One curious fact about my blood glucose readings is the running average for the month. Despite the two meters often giving quite different readings, sometime one or the other being higher, they current average for the new meter is 8.69mmol/l and the old meter 8.67mmol/l. It is my hope that this rolling average will be similar to what a proper lab test would show (which is also a sort of average over a couple of months). Despite sometimes almost a random high reading, it does seem that I am still controlling my blood glucose quite well. The average has remained very consistent over the last three years (I started doing these averages in 2021).

  Today is going to be a partial day of rest. I am not planning on going out, but I am planing on trying to watch what I eat today - if I can. I am not sure how to do it because there is often no rhyme or reason for it, but I would dearly love to avoid anything like constipation if I want to go out for much of the day and remain comfortable. The other thing I can do with complete success is to get my cameras ready for Chattfest. There is the potential to take hundreds of photos, and I need to make sure all the batteries are charged. I intend to take two cameras, my Nikon D80 and my Nikon D300s. Both use the same batteries - which is handy. I will probably use the D80 for wide angle shots, and the D300 for the rest. I'll also be taking, and probably using a flash gun - possibly two ! It gets quite dark in the sort of part open sided shed that is the stage.