This morning has started with the road outside looking a bit damp after some rain in the night. There is far worse to come. Both forecasters are convinced there will be thunderstorms today. The latest revision has not made any change to the screenshot above. The BBC have really gone overboard with their forecast. they show no less than 8 hours when there will be, or could be, thunderstorms. I think even the Met Office with three possible hours with thunderstorms may be hedging their bets, but today is definitely going to be wet ! It is also going to be a cool day with a maximum temperature as low as 18° C according to The met Office. The BBC say a degree lower with a high of just 17° C. Tomorrow will be cloudy, but dry. There might even be a single sunny spell in the early evening. It will be a bit warmer with 21 or 22° C predicted.

  Yesterday was a curious mix of good and bad. The good was the knowledge that sooner or later I would be getting two deliveries. The bad was the sort of anticlimax after the deliveries arrived. Until they arrived I was on high alert while also resting...or basically doing very little.

  The first delivery was by Parcelforce, and it was of the £92 order for special beers. There was an instant anticlimax there because apart from looking at the cans and bottles, I can't open any until Jodie is here. that might be on Sunday - if the train's are running. That delivery was just before midday. The next delivery was a minute early, and was one of the two "renewed" PCs I had ordered. Because the courier was a minute early he asked me to bear with him while he waited on my doorstep before officially logging the delivery.

  That PC was a sort of anticlimax. I ordered one small PC and one mini PC. I was going to use the mini PC as the new server, and I thought it was going to be the first to be delivered. It wasn't. It was the small PC. I was all psyched up to install the software on the mini PC for my new web server, and when the small, not mini, PC turned up it sort of knocked the wind from my sails.

  I did get as far as opening it up to see how to replace the hard drive in it, and see what sort of RAM was installed. I thought I had a spare stick of RAM to increase it's memory, but I didn't have the proper stuff. I don't think it will actually need more RAM, although it would if I used it as my main PC. It might have been tempting to do just that, but Ideally I would need to install two hard disks for that. Unfortunately it only has two SATA connections - one for a hard disk, and one for the CD/DVD drive. Maybe that is a shame because I think it probably has a better processor than my current PC.

  After looking at the new PC I sort of lost interest in it, and had to think of other stuff to do to amuse myself. It included doing things like eating. I had this great idea that I would have cheese on toast for my lunch. I ended up using the last 6 slices of the Polish sourdough bread I had. The bread is a sort of torpedo shape with the end slices getting quite small. That is why I ended up having six slices of quite small slices. it was very tasty, and, fingers crossed, it should have been a low sugar meal even if the calories and saturated fat count was rather high.

  Later in the afternoon, after doing some reading, and a short snooze, I resumed a project I had put on hold for a long time. It was to transfer stuff on dusty CD and DVD disks to hard drive. It started with ripping a DVD That I had made back to mp4 files. I had made it from lost (I think) mp4 files ripped from ancient VHS tapes. It was recordings of the 1987 BBC serial "Star Cops". The DVD I had made had four episodes, and as the ripping process was about halfway through I remembered that the tape that had the last episodes on had got lost, or was damaged or something.

  I decided to see if I could find a naughty download of the whole series of 9 episodes. There was, and it also had some extras related to the series. It was quite a big download, and finished very late in the day. While that was downloading I picked up another DVD disk to rip back to mp4 files. I was halfway through that when I remembered I had a copy of "Space Cowboys" on a proper DVD - but I haven't. I finally remembered I had bought it from a charity shop, and the cased had the wrong DVD in it. I shall keep the home made DVD and not throw it away like others once they have been ripped. I shall store it in the real DVD library case.

  Tonight I've watched a fair bit of TV, and I had a light dinner of two cans of the ultra low sugar Tesco cream of chicken soup. Unfortunately i ruined it all when TV got a bit boring and I munched through half a packet of sugar free chocolate chip cookies that don't seem to be sugar free at all ! Like the last few days, I have written all this the night before instead of the morning. At this time I predict I will be in bed by 10pm, and I hope I'll be fast asleep soon after.

  I think I was asleep by about 10.30pm last night, and I seemed to sleep well. I only remember getting up for a pee twice, but I do remember having lots of dreams. Most dreams seemed so brief and inconsequential that I have forgotten any details. One dream was inspired by one of the short SciFi stories I read recently. In the dream I was a photographer for a scummy newspaper, and I was taking pictures of a slug like creature that suddenly appeared in town, and was eating people. To do so it first removed their clothes. I was ordered to get pictures of nice titties.

  The circumstances were a bit sick, but I did get a few "good" snaps. The actual story was a lot longer than the minute or so of my dream, it was also a lot grimmer. The slugs favourite way of eating was to snap off the legs and arms of it's living prey - in much the same way as we might do it with a cooked chicken. The story was in two parts - one from the viewpoint of the humans, and the other from the slug. It turned out the slug was an investigator for an alien race of slugs who was checking to see if humans were a good source of food !

  In trying to make sure I remembered that dream I seem to have let the details of another interesting dream fade from my memory. That is a pity because I remember it as being interesting even if I can't seem to remember any details. Just one image remains, and it is of a bird nesting in a bowl of fruit. The fruit looked a bit like kiwi fruit, but soft and fluffy. I, or maybe someone else, was trying to get the bird out without hurting it so the fruit could be eaten.

  It seems I had a bit of a lay in this morning. I didn't get out of bed until just after 6.30am ! It wasn't long before the awful truth of my blood glucose was revealed. As expected after eating half the quite small packet of alleged sugar free chocolate chip cookies late in the evening, my readings were annoyingly high, although supposedly still in the safe zone. The new meter said 9.0mmol/l - almost OK, while the old meter read 9.3mmol/l. The latter is not too bad, but two days like this have got my rolling monthly average off to a very bad start.

  One thing I am definitely doing today is to have a good scrub under the shower. I didn't wash yesterday or, gasp !, the day before either. Today I will probably go out, although maybe only for a brief visit to the shops, so I had better be a bit more positively fragrant than I am as I write this ! Being a Wednesday I would be going to the Jolly Farmers for a few pints of Guinness, but I think I can probably be excused not going in the middle of a thunderstorm. I still might go though.

  I don't think I am expecting a parcel today, although it is possible. That could be another reason for staying in today. My parcel, containing what I hope is a mini PC, was reported to be at Crydon at 3.52am (If I recall correctly). It is not far from there to my local depot. Whether it will get there in time to go out for delivery, by postman, today is unknown, but it does sound possible. Hopefully the tracking info will say when it gets to Catford, and then I can decide if it is safe to pop out to Tesco. It is possible today could be as boring as the proverbial "rainy day".