It was quite dull when I first peeped out the window, and now, when we should be expecting full sunshine shortly, it is still a bit dull. There is a lot of cloud, and no gaps visible in it.The latest revision to the forecast starts at 11am showing sunny spells, and full sunshine from midday. Fingers crossed ! Assuming we do get the forecast sunshine the temperature should rise to 25° C today. Tomorrow, like today, may also start off dull, but in other respects I think we can expect it to be very similar to today.

   Off to a very late start this morning because I had lots to do, and I kept putting off starting, but I've started, and so I shall finish. Yesterday involved a lot of photo editing and stuff, but all that came to a halt mid afternoon when tasting beer was the distraction.

  A quick aside: I can now see a small blue patch of sky, but it is on the western horizon, and not to the east where the sun is. Oh well.....

  Yesterday I started selecting and editing photos in a sort of gloomy mood. That was still my grumpiness about not getting a back stage pass for Chislehurst Rocks - which would not have been too terrible if only the place was rammed with people who all seemed to want to see Hell On Tap. Before and after they were more evenly spread over the too small (in my opinion) field. I soon felt happier when I realised that my new camera was producing some rather good pictures.
  To be honest it was not that much different to my Nikon D300s. The useful difference is that the new Nikon D610 has twice the image sensor area, and that produces less noise, and it also has four times the amount of pixels. With a well taken, well framed, photo that doesn't matter so much, but on those occasions when you want to heavily crop the picture it doesn't degrade the picture much. I did take one picture of Steve Blessing (above) where I wanted an extreme close up of him "bending" the strings on his guitar.  Unfortunately I didn't prepare a copy to show here, but if I did you would not realise it was just a small part of the original photo.
  It wasn't ideal to have very bright sunlight shining into the stage from the right. For this picture of Carrie I had to selectively lighten, and slightly darken, parts on the image to reduce the deep shadows. I must admit that for some pictures the shadows did enhance the look of the photo.
  This is The Heat. They sounded pretty good - not as "power rock" like Hell On Tap, but still the basic magic mix of guitar, bass, drums and a good vocalist for basic rock. They were on after Hell On Tap, and although I wanted to leave the place, I stayed for a good half hour to get some pictures of them. I had given up on my wide angles lens because I was kept so far from the stage by the crowd barriers that my usual lens could fit the whole band in. I fitted a zoom lens to the other camera to get close ups of the drummer and faces.

  By early afternoon I had uploaded two Hell On Tap photo albums to social media, and the "likes", and even a scattering of "loves" really heartened me, and made the difficulties I endured worthwhile. I will admit that in a case of pure petty spite, I refused to mention the name of the even where I took them. I could rationalise that by saying that if the event wanted to use any of my pictures for publicity (which they wouldn't, and I don't think they did last year) they should have "paid" me (with a back stage pass so I could work for longer and under less stress).

  At a bit after 3.30pm Jodie arrived for out Sunday beer drinking session. Once again she complained she had drunk too much the night before, and felt "a bit beered out".  Fortunately she chose "hair of the dog" as a remedy, and we had some quite strong beers. One beer in particular I had two bottles of made in consecutive beers. They were from the Ukraine Varvar brewery, and called "Midnight Velvet".

  It was because they were hand brewed, and not made in a factory, that they were very noticeably different. For a start on was 9.3% and the other was 10.5%. One tasted nice than the other, and I am sure it had nothing to do with the alcohol content. To make dark, stout like, beers means roasting the barley until it is very brown (similar to roasting coffee beans). I think the one with less alcohol was the result of slightly burning the barley, and thus burning the sugars that are extracted from the barley. It was an interesting exercise about the brewing process, although my thoughts about it here have not been confirmed by any authoritative sources.

  We had a few other rather nice, and moderately strong beers. Jodie, apart from some grumpiness about meeting her special friend Alan, who had been getting drunk elsewhere, seemed much cheered....or slightly drunk. She left to get the 6.45 train to Clock House station where she would walk a 100ft to The Three Hounds where she would meet Alan. Meanwhile, my thoughts turned to dinner.

  I had a perfectly cooked, and ready to eat casserole of mostly lamb and white cabbage, but for some unknown reason I didn't fancy it. I suppose the reason was drunkenness, and what I probably wanted was a plate of chips. Chips were an impossible order, although in the clear light of day I think I may have some oven chips in the back of the freezer. What I did have was one left of the three Tesco Rogan Ghosh curries I bought as much as a fortnight ago. They were something like 3 for £7, and I was suckered into buying the three.

  The next day, after eating two of those curries for dinner, my blood glucose reading suffered badly. I hoped just one would cause.....well, half the effect, or so I hoped. Unfortunately just the one ready meal wasn't going to satisfy, and double so after boozing. I opened up a can of Turkish (or Greek) big beans with a sausage in a sort of sauce. It was a thinner version of the syrupy tomato sauce you get with baked beans, but the small tin still seemed as if it might have more sugar than is ideal for me.

  I tried watching a bit of TV last night, but there was nothing that really caught my attention. I ended up doing more photo editing until about 9pm when I went to bed. I read for a while before turning out the light. I can't recall having any difficulty getting to sleep, and generally I slept rather well through  the night. I think it was 4.55am when I got up, for possibly just the second time during the night, for a pee. When I went back to bed there was a small delay before I got back to sleep.

  I must admit that I did find it odd that I peed so little in the night. After the beer, and with the potential of a high blood glucose content, I expected to pee more. Maybe I just had a very sound sleep, although for some unknown reason I find that unlikely. On the other hand it was the sort of sleep where you forget your dreams, or at least the content of the dreams. I know i had a dream that I tried to remember because there was something worth telling about it, but any memory of it has completely evaporated now.

  I was partly correct in thinking my blood glucose would be high this morning. The new meter read 9.2mmol/l, and it was one of those rare occasions when the old meter agreed with it exactly. Any reading in the nines, or over, is very undesirable, but 9.2 is in the low nines, and well below the red line at 10.0mmol/l. I know I have to try and be careful today, but it didn't put me off having an instant noodles cocktail this morning. I thought that a small packet (60gm ?) was less than I wanted, and so I added another small packet on top of the first. The first was Polish tomato flavour, and the second was Asian stir fry flavour. They complemented each other nicely. I may try it again some day.

  Today I have a single small hand towel to finish washing. I also have at least another moderately big photo albums worth of photos to select and edit. I know that a part 3 photo album of Hot On Tap will have minimum of impact compared to the first two, but I've taken the pictures, and might as well use them. Other than that I may have a snooze, and I may do some reading.....and possibly very little else.