The latest revision to the forecast has tried to bow to reality. It now shows sunny spells for 9 and 10am. The rest of the day is still shown as dull white cloud. There certainly has been some sunshine this morning, but it looks unlikely the sun will break through again in time for 9am ! On the other hand, The BBC forecast shows sunny spells, and even some full sunshine throughout the day.Both forecasters agree on a temperature of 21° C today, although The BBC does show a single hour at 22° C when full sunshine is shown. I don't think today's forecasts are terribly helpful.  The forecast for tomorrow by The BBC shows sunny spells until mid afternoon. The Met Office shows dull clouds until mid afternoon when sunny spells will start ! The BBC predict 19° C tomorrow, and The Met Office predict 18° C.

   Yesterday had it's highs and lows, but the biggest high was totally unexpected. For a week or more there was a very large spider living in my bathroom. It was always high up, and for 3 or 4 days it seemed dormant. Yesterday it started moving again, and it crawled down the wall to where I could catch it in a glass, and throw it out the window !

  We have been told that "house spiders" can't survive outside the house, and so by that metric I have murdered the spider. On the other hand, you have to wonder just where that spider came from. Logically it must have come from outside at some point in the past, Maybe my spider has survived being outside, and will hopefully find a different house to live in - if it is not eaten by a bird or something.

  The main event yesterday was going to give my blood, and urine sample to the vampires under the eaves of the group practice. When I spoke to the nice lady who always seems to win the contest for the most pain free blood sampling, she, in answer to my question about whether they still did a walk in service, said no. She said that the appointment system was far superior because there were no queues, and you were in and out in minutes.

  Yeah sure ! I arrived just 5 minutes early in case they were getting bored waiting for their next victim. My appointment time was 10.45am, and that time passed, and so did 10.50, 10.55, and finally, at just past 11am I was called. I was shown into the room, and told to wait for a minute as the phlebotomist needed to do do something else first. Five minutes later she came in, and prepared her tools. She managed to get the needle in with only a slight prick pain, and then withdrew 2 tubes of blood. I have most definitely had far quicker service when it was a walk in service - although usually by getting there spot on opening time.

  After getting home again I prepared a late breakfast. I thought it better not to saturate my blood with glucose before giving the blood samples - it was bloody high enough without breakfast yesterday morning. My late breakfast was two lots of instant noodles - both of which I had bought from Aldi the day before. The first was made by Itsu. I had one with the same brand name I had bought from Tesco, and it was rubbish. Yesterday's was a Japanese protein noodles "flavour". The actually flavour was hard to discern, and the noodles were unpleasantly chewy and rubbery.

  I think in future I will avoid Itsu noodles, although I do have one other flavour bought from Aldi that sounds nice, but I am not expecting it to be so now. The second instant noodles were Korean BBQ flavour from the Naked brand name. They were far nicer, bit suffered a typical problem of noodles that come in a plastic "mug". All the soup base powder settles to the bottom, and unless you give it a vigorous stir straight after pouring the boiling water on it, you end up with a very flavourful mud at the bottom. I will give the next one like this a good, upside down, shaking to try and distribute the soup base powder through the noodles instead of under them.

  It was getting on for midday when I finished that rather late breakfast, and I tried to fix in my brain that I would not be eating again until dinner time. Of course this did not work 100%, but it probably helped a lot - particularly when there were few distractions for the rest of the day. One distraction was some laundry. After my morning shower (and hair washing) I left some stuff soaking in detergent.

  It was almost 2pm before I returned to that laundry. It was only one easy to hand wash t-shirt, and 3 pairs of underpants, also easy to hand wash, but with a not so easy to hand wash, pair of shorts. Those shorts were starting to smell a bit stale, and it seemed a very good idea to get them fresh before putting than away for the winter, and probably spring. I actually split the rinses and final fabric conditioner into two sessions - mainly because I needed the toilet before I had finished the job.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon in carefully cultivated laziness. I read some stuff on the internet (Stuff like this: https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/27/mars_ai_life/ which has just been added the The register website, and which I have yet to read, but I look forward to doing so). I also read some pages from the book I am reading.

  The book is interesting in a special way. It is called "A Man Of Two Worlds" by Frank And Brian Herbert. The (to me) interesting thing is that it is has been on my bookshelf for years, and I could recall almost nothing about it.  About 20 or 30 pages in I found a railway ticket. It was dated 13th August 2011, and was the outward portion of a return to Ramsgate. I can't actually remember it, but I suspect I took the book with me to help pass the stupidly long (2 hours !) journey to Ramsgate. The Ticket must have marked where I got up to before apparently abandoning the book until now. Maybe now I can concentrate on the book a bit better than on a rail journey, I am finding it quite readable.

  I had my dinner while watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I had done the initial cooking of what was finalised as a beef, broccoli and cauliflower stew the day before. Yesterday I just had to add the vegetable, and zap it in the microwave for about 15 minutes. It seemed quite tasty, and quite filling. Best of all was that it was a recipe known to contain hardly any sugar.

  Once again I was in bed soon after 8pm. That was mainly because I had run out of other distractions, except reading my book. I didn't feel all that tired at that time, although it wasn't long before I started yawning. I read for some time before it felt like the right time to go to sleep. It was nice that I think that idea actually worked last night. I can't remember much about it, and that feels like it was a good sign. Maybe I was asleep by 9pm, but that is a pure guess.

  I do know that it was 1am before I woke up to go for a pee. I think it was in that long period of sleep that I had an unusual dream, and one that seemed so realistic that I thought I would see evidence of it this morning. In the dream I had come across what was probably part of an advert. It was two pictures of rooms that were well furnished with very comfy looking chairs, but in each of the two pictures there was a biker sitting on a motorbike with a caption saying the most comfortable motorbike, and better than any of the picture comfy chairs.

  As I said, it seemed so realistic, and also so simple for a dream, that I expected to see those pictures waiting for me on my desktop so I could reduce the size of them, and paste them side by side to show here this morning. That dream, assuming it happened just before I woke up, was maybe some sort of reason for a period of insomnia. At least I think it was insomnia. It could have been a dream too as I thought about the photo editing needed to stitch the two pictures together.

  My next fairly long period of sleep featured some raunchy dreams. There was one dream that seemed to have no beginning or end, but the middle featured a woman waggling her naked bottom at me. It was sort of nice, but I can't remember any more than a few waggles ! The next dream is a bit confusing because there seems no linear sense to events in it - suggesting it was not just a single dream.

  It seemed to start with me looking down a garden path that went behind a shed towards the back door of a house (presumably my house). I could see the back door was wide open, and I worried about cats of dogs of foxes and even rats having easy entry into the house. I could also see the front door through the house, and it too was wide open. I rushed to shut both doors. Just before the back door was something like a veranda, and on it was a black man dressed in some sort of African tribal costume.

  As I passed him he started some sort of war dance, but gave it all away by chanting "boogie woogie boogie". I recognised him as the accountant who lived a couple of doors away. It was his party piece. The funny thing is that he was the son of an immigrant from Jamaica, and had never seen Jamaica and had never been anywhere near Africa. He was performing his "party piece" because there was a party going on in the house.

  The next bit of the dream (or maybe the next dream) is very very confusing. It was like I was laying on the floor when a young woman approached, and wanted to grab a can of beer from someone the other side of me. She was wearing nice knee high boots, and a slinky leather dress. As she reached across me the leather dress rode up, and I had a very good view of her underwear......or actually the lack of it ! That was one dream I didn't want to wake up from !

  This morning the final truth about how carefully I hoped I had eaten yesterday was revealed. I did my blood sampling in my newly invented way that should give identical readings on all three meters. The meters did agree on one thing - that my blood glucose was back to a nice low figure, but could not agree on an actual figure. The new meter gave a really splendid figure of 7.1mmol/l. It is not very often I see it that low. The old meter said 7.5mmol/l, and that is excellent too. The oldest meter said 8.1mmol/l. At other times that would be excellent, but I had rather hoped at least two of the meters would give close to identical figures. Not this time though.

  It is nice being back to not having any important appointments in the morning, and being able to take my time preparing for the world. Of course, being a Wednesday, I do have an optional, but desired appointment. As usual I shall be heading to The Jolly Farmers to have a pint of more of Guinness, do the crosswords, and on this Wednesday I am taking my laptop to show Ayse, my favourite barmaid, the pictures I took at Angela's wedding. There remains a sub-microscopic chance that Angela might join me, but I am not holding my breath !