There seems to be hope that today could be a dry day ! This morning is delightfully sunny, but maybe the clouds are already starting to build up. The latest revision to the forecast still says that the last sunny spells will finish at 9am, although a single hour of sunny spells at 4pm may happen - unless the BBC have it right. They add sunny spells at 11am and 1pm, plus for most of the evening.A temperature of 22° C is expected today. Tomorrow rain, and a lot of it could be heavy, is expected from 10am to 5pm. The BBC throw in their usual hopes/warnings of thunderstorms for midday and the early evening. It will be a cool day with little more than 18° C expected tomorrow.

  Initially I said that I felt quite good early yesterday morning. I am unsure what happened, but some hours later I was feeling not so good. My right elbow and wrist were quite sore at times, and a few other bits seemed to ache. I also felt quite low. I would say depression was too strong a word for it, but it definitely involved ennui and lethargy.

  I had to grit my teeth a lot to get the laundry I had started the previous day finished, and hung up to dry. By then the first rain was falling, and so drying it indoors was the only choice. One thing that made me feel sort of better was some "retail therapy". I got to considering the plan I was cooking up to replace the old laptop being used as the web server for tehse pages, and replace it was a desktop machine.

  I concluded that the desktop PC I was going to use could possibly be better used as my firewall box. At the moment that is being provided by a small PC that is cooled by little high speed fans. The trouble with those fans is that they get very noisy after a few years, and my firewall box makes a bit of a racket now. it is not loud enough to distract from the beer drinking in the dining room, but something has to be done about it sooner or later. New fans would keep it quiet for maybe a year, but it does run 24/7.

  My current desktop PC seems to be close to completely silent, and so I may ultimately use the spare I bought to replace it as the firewall some day. It turned out that it was not quite as good as I wanted to replace my desktop PC. I decided to look for "renewed" Dell mini PCs on Amazon, and found a hopefully nice one for £99. I ordered it, and to my amazement it had shipped by late afternoon, and DPD say they expect they will deliver it today. That will give me something to do today !

  I spent some time researching alternative firewall software for a new firewall. The software I am using at the moment is end of life, and needs replacing. Now I have another project lined up for a rainy day - and we seem to have many of those to go until summer returns - if it does. Incidently, Chattfest has now been rescheduled for the 26th and 27th of August. Hopefully they will be dry and sunny days, and hopefully I will be feeling fit and healthy on those days.

  Feeling fit and healthy is not an easy thing at the moment. My eating was partly controlled yesterday in so much as nearly everything I ate was modestly low sugar, and maybe low(ish) calorie. That would be fine but I ate lots of it, and of course all those little bits add up to a lot. My dinner, which was 2 cans of Irish stew was not really a good idea in terms of diet, but was nice, warm and filling. Last night I was dreading checking my blood glucose reading this morning, and positively terrified to get on the scales !

  Like the last couple of nights, I have taken advantage of nothing on TV for an hour between the Star Treks, and QI, to write much of this, but as usual I will finish it in the morning when those blood glucose readings will be revealed. Now I look forward to watching QI, and then going to bed. Hopefully I'll sleep OK.

  I ended up going to sleep quite late because I lay reading in bed until I finished the book I was reading. I think it could have been almost 11pm before I was asleep. Once asleep I slept well - at least I think I did ! Just for a change I had some ecological dreams....or probably anti-ecological dreams. I am already forgetting some of the details, but I can remember the important details from two dreams that seemed to merge as one. In the first one a helicopter, with flame thrower burnt a friends small, garden sized, plantation of tobacco plants.

  I'm guessing that this dream was set in the future when tobacco had been completely banned, although such an idea didn't really appear in the dream. That dream seemed to move on to a bit of common land where some big trees were being felled. In this case there were protesters who seemed to be very misguided. One tree was so rotten that it fell down a few seconds after it was slightly cut into by a chain saw.

  There may have been a following dream that continued the tree felling. I was watching it from across a road, and taking pictures with one of my Nikon cameras. it wasn't long before the dream turned into mild nightmare. I had put down my camera, and couldn't find it again. I saw quite a few cameras, both still, and video laying on the ground where the photographers were taking a break, and none of those had been touched. From that I assumed it was not a case of theft, but just me not remembering where I left it. It is all a bit hazy, but I think I woke up without finding it.

  It was with great trepidation that I checked my blood glucose this morning. I expected it to be very high, but it turned out to be just plain ordinary high. It was one of those rare mornings when the old and new blood glucose meters almost agreed with each other. The new meter said 9.6mmol/l, and the old one read 9.5mmol/l. Both these figures are on the safe side of the red line, but far from ideal, and a rotten way to start a new month.

  I hope I can do something to reduce those readings tomorrow, but it is going to be hard to do. Today the morning sunshine makes it a bit happier, but the sunshine/sunny spells won't last long. It is also going to be a mildly stressful day. I am expecting two deliveries today, and possibly a third. One delivery is the beers I ordered on Sunday. The stress here is the usual waiting with bated breath for that ring on the doorbell, and then, once they are here, not being able to do anything with them without Jodie's supervision - which could be on Thursday next week !

  The second delivery is coming by Parcelforce - which could be a novelty. I usually see their van quite early in the morning, and so I am hoping to get the waiting over soon(ish). Then I have the stress finding out if what I ordered is indeed suitable for it's intended use - which is a new, and faster server for these web pages. If it all works I think I can take a chance on the occasional higher resolution video. The third possible delivery should just come through the ordinary post. It is a new battery for an older mobile phone. I hope that when it eventually arrived it will be the right one. The previous one I ordered by Ebay, that hangout of crooks and charlatans, was for the right make, but wrong model of phone. Hopefully the one that is apparently in the post to me will be for the right phone. My only hope is that it is from a different seller.