This morning the sky was clear, and still is. The first consequence of this was that this morning started out rather cool. The forecast of just 14° C was about right for 7am, but my thermometers say it is now 16° C. The BBC weather forecast says sunny spells all day, but the Met Office say the sunny spell should last until 3pm until the first cloud rolls by. After that we may only get long sunny spells. This afternoon should be warm with a temperature of 23° C. Tomorrow could be similar to today, but the temperature may rise to 25 or even 26° C.

  Yesterday was one of those days where it seemed little happened, particularly in the afternoon, but they day felt OK, and so I felt OK too - except for the usual wrist and elbow aches that crop up most days. I did manage to do two very useful things in the morning. The first was to get through, on my first attempt, to the pharmacy to order my next repeat prescription for collection on Thursday.

  The other thing was the long awaited shopping trip to Tesco. I had been meaning to go since last Saturday. I got there just before midday, and started shopping very carefully. I did give in to a combination of curiosity and reduced price stickers. The offending articles were a "jerk bean pasty" and a vegetarian, Bombay style, spinach and potato "Cornish" pasty. I ate both for my lunch, and it seems I got away with it.

  My major purchases were two packs of diced meat - one pork, and the other was beef. I also bought two different packs of smoked bacon - always handy for those special moments when only grilled bacon will do. Tesco seems to have increased its range of instant noodles. They are scattered in three different parts of the store, but I found all three places, and replenished my thinning stock of instant noodles.

  One notable thing about coming back from Tesco was that it started to rain soon after leaving the store. Some quite big drops of rain fell, but there were so few of them that I didn't feel wet, although if I had left it a bit later it did seem that some more steady drizzle fell once I was indoors. Even so, I noticed that the ground was looking quite wet, but maybe because I didn't personally experience the rain, I have little idea about how heavy it might have got, nor when it finally finished.

  My afternoon was spend doing a few little jobs and a couple of bigger ones. The bigger ones included doing some washing up. Washing the slow cooker ceramic bowl is always a bugger because it is rather heavy. Once it, and some more minor items were washed I started cooking my dinner in the slow cooker. It would end up as a pork stew....or was it a casserole ? I always seem to call these things stews, but maybe casserole is the more correct description. I ought to check on what the difference is, and use the correct name in the future......if I can be bothered.

  One major, but incomplete job I actually started as soon as I had had my morning shower. It was to wash my medium sized bath towel. I left it soaking for hours before I started on the rinses. As usual it seems to take endless rinses to get all the soap out, and wringing out that soaking wet, and very heavy towel is hard work. After the third or fourth rinse it still seemed soapy, and my arms were aching. I left it to finish it this morning. I should be able to hang it in the sunshine to dry today - if I can hack my way down the overgrown garden path !

  One other thing I did in the afternoon was to lay on my bed reading. It didn't seem to take long before my eyelids were drooping. I put the book down and had a nice snooze. It seems time was flying by, and before I knew it, it was time to turn on the TV for the first of three Star Trek episodes. Neither was particularly good. The episode from the original series seemed so familiar that it lost most entertainment value.

  Star Trek:Deep Space Nine was a sort of good episode because the "star" character was Quark, the Ferengi bar keeper. Somehow stories around him are always more enjoyable than those about boring Bajorans and all their prophets and twisted religious stuff. Star Trek: Voyager was a potentially good story, and maybe almost enjoyable on the first showing, but knowing how shmaltzy, and sugar sweet it was, left me disappointed.

  While watching Deep Space Nine, starting at 6pm, I had my dinner. It was supposed to be the pork stew/casserole I had started making early in the afternoon. I made one mistake when making it - I put too much water in it, and while it was tasty, it was so thin. I thought I had made enough for possibly two days, and so last night I only had one bowl of it. My idea is that I will add some gravy thickener once it has been cooked a bit more today. Only having one bowl seemed the perfect excuse to dare to have a tub of my known usually safe, low calorie/sugar ice cream. It was good !

  At 8pm there didn't seem to be anything on TV that I fancied watching, and I turned off the TV. I pottered around for maybe an hour before retiring to bed with the book I am reading ("This Fortress World" by James Gunn). One thing I did before going to bed was to take a couple of Paracetamol tablets to tame some aches. Mostly they were my right wrist and elbow, but I had some muscular ache at the top of my arm that extended up into my neck. It seems to be very similar to what my neighbour suffers from, and was diagnosed as torn muscle tissue - possibly a legacy of heaving lifting in the past. I certainly used to pick up and carry some bloody heavy TVs during my years as a TV repairman.

  Those painkillers worked well. I think it was around 10pm when I very easily slipped into quite a deep sleep. I think almost 4 hours passed until I woke up mildly needing a pee. Another 3 or more hours passed before I woke up again - I think. Like my dreams, my memories of most of the night seem very vague. I think it was not long after 5am that I woke up needing a small pee. I got back into bed, and hoped I could get back to sleep until just after 6am. It was actually 7.15am when I woke up next, and decided it was time to get up.

  It actually feel like I got enough sleep last night.....although as I typed that I could feel a yawn starting to develop, but as yet it hasn't made it to the surface, and if I change the subject it may never do. Eating the two pasty things for lunch seemed a bit of a gamble, and eating the ice cream for a dessert after dinner was a bigger gamble. It seems I got away with both. My new blood glucose meter read 8.1mmol/l, and the old one read 8.0mmol/l - both very good readings this morning.

  One of the first things I have to do today is to finish washing the bath towel, and get it hanging in the sunshine to dry. Then I can wash myself, including my hair, ready to do.......?  What I really should do is some work in the garden to strim down the so called lawn to something looking less like the Amazon rain forest. What I actually fancy doing is going out with a camera. If my guts feel OK (they seem a bit parlous at the moment) I could go as far as the seaside. I do have an ambition to go to Southend via the Great Eastern route to Southend Victoria. I doubt I will do that today, but anything might be possible....