The sun is shining as I write this, and should continue for the rest of the day - except for possibly 2pm. All that sunshine, and the temperature may only rise to 11° C. Tomorrow could see heavy rain all day, and it will be cold. Just 8° C is expected.

   My "tailbone" injury was usually comfortable yesterday, but a nudge in the wrong way could still be very uncomfortable. The rest of my injuries had settled down well, and apart from being careful how I sat down, I had a fairly usual sort of day, or it would have been usual/normal if I wasn't waiting on Amazon to deliver a parcel.

  It was about 11.30am when I was emailed to say my parcel was out for delivery - a day earlier than originally forecast, and that was most handy. There was an unlikely possibility that my parcel could be delivered in just a few hours. That meant I needed to go out to get some shopping without waiting for the rain to stop. I put on my best walking boots, and hooded raincoat before heading out into the foul weather.

  I had decided my destination was to be Aldi. There were a few special reasons for choosing there. Aldi seem to do cheaper boxes of man sized tissues than Tesco, and I'm not so sure they aren't as cheap as Savers. I think, but cannot prove, that they also do good quality shaving razors. I found they do a 5 blade razor and also replaceable blades for it. Maybe others do the same, but I so rarely buy razors that I haven't really shopped around.

  I bought several packs of meat for grilling to make home made shish-like kebabs. Unfortunately i found when I got home that I had accidently picked up a pack of minced beef instead of diced beef. I can't grill that, unless I made it into patties, and grilled it like burgers. I chose to cook it in my slow cooker with onion and white cabbage (plus the usual herbs and spices).

  I left Aldi straight into the heavy rain that was forecast, and being out in it made it seem to be very heavy ! I was mostly dry inside my hooded raincoat, and the rain seem to run off my black corduroy jeans rather than soak through them. The main problem I had was the hood slipping forward to part obscure my view ahead. I can't say the walk home was enjoyable, but it was curiously exhilarating.

  I was supposed to be fasting at least until dinner time yesterday, but after seeing all the food in Aldi I had to have something to eat, and I had bought something that was hopefully nice, and allegedly with a very low sugar content. It was ready cooked bits of "tikka" flavoured chicken. I would have expected it to be dyed almost red, but it only had a very pale hint of red or orange about it. It didn't even seem to have much of an exotic flavour, but it was nice enough, and fill a small gap in my stomach.

  After my morning shower I had left some laundry in to soak. It was a single hand towel, a t-shirt and some underwear. After a couple of rinses I put the towel aside, and continued rinsing the rest until a final treatment with fabric conditioner before an extra strength wringing out, and hanging it on the clothes horse to dry. The towel needed lots more rinsing, and even then I couldn't get the rinse water soap free. Despite all the adverts on TV extolling the virtues of fabric conditioner on towels, I don't use it. It seems to stop the towel being so absorbent.

  Through the whole afternoon I was wondering when my parcel might arrive. The Amazon tracking page just said "by 9pm", and then it changed at about 5pm to show a tracking map. It seemed to take forever to see that little green dot move across the map. Finally, at about 6pm, my parcel was delivered. The first of the contents to check were all the multi coloured Dymo "Letratag" tapes.

  The next thing to examine in more detail was the wireless remote trigger.shutter button for my Canon cameras, but also for my Nikon cameras*.  Like many cheap Chinese things the usual manual was very thin, and not terribly informative, but it did contain enough information to lightly polish what it was easy enough to see by actually handling the transmitter and receiver. The only thing that was very slightly vague was a switch to select single shot, delayed shot, and multiple shots.

* All my Canon camera use a 2.5mm three pole plug and socket for a remote shutter trigger. My Nikons use a small, rectangular, similar to a micro USB socket but different, for remote trigger. However, as I discovered the previous day, the GPS unit I have for my newest Nikons has a 2.5mm socket for a remote trigger that is passed down the GPS data connection. I haven't tried it, but I don't think the GPS unit has to be on to pass the trigger signal to the camera. It is a bit of a bodge, but now, should I ever need to trigger a camera remotely, I can do it to either my Canon or Nikon cameras.

  I have to admit that I probably have a lifetime, or more, supply of ribbons for my Letratag label maker. A few extra white and a few extra yellow ribbons were definitely handy, but I bought 5 of each, and that may have been a bit over the top. The third lot of ribbons contained fluorescent orange and fluorescent green, plus a white on black ribbon and probably two ordinary white ribbons.

  I had to think hard to find some reason to try some of these ribbons. I had a couple of 2.5" hard drive enclosures which I labled in fluorescent orange to show which was for SATA drives, and which was for IDE drives. I found the white on black labels were good for viewing through antistatic plastic. It also looks good on black plastic.
  I had a black on blue label on my computer monitor to remind me of it's display resolution. It was starting to look a bit grubby, and was pealing at one edge. I used my new white on black ribbon for a new label. The plastic it is on is more like very dark grey, and it has a rough texture so it doesn't really match, but it looks worse in this close up photo. To the naked eye, at a small distance, it looks pretty good.

  When it came to dinner time I was still wanting to keep my sugar consumption very low despite a blood glucose reading before dinner showing the level had dropped to almost normal. I decided I would first eat a pack of large coin sized slices of BBQ flavour chicken on rice crackers. That was good, but I thought that the chicken let it down. Some more rice crackers with jalapeño cheese slices went down even better. It wasn't an obviously filling dinner, but good enough.

  After watching the usual three Star Treks I went to bed. Out of all the Star Treks it was Deep Space Nine that was best. It was the wonderful episode where they go back in time to when Kirk, from the original series had "Trouble With Tribbles". There was some marvellous video editing/compositing that inserted the modern characters among the old - and it was near as dammit seamless !
  My latest bed time reading is Helliconia by Brian Aldiss. It is a single volume containing the three books of the trilogy. As you can see, it is rather a thick book - 2.5 inches thick ! It is not an easy bed time read. I managed about a dozen pages last night before it felt like my wrists were going to snap. Not only is it a very thick book to handles, the contents seem a bit thick too. I thought that some of the planet Helliconia was inhabited by modern humans, but so far I have only read about what could be just Neanderthals. It is not gripping stuff so far.

  I was asleep by about 9pm, and on the whole I had another very good night's sleep. There was one period when I woke up sweating. It may have been while digesting the Jalapeño cheese, or it may have been some sort of fever or something. All I know was that for a short while it was tricky finding the right amount of duvet cover to be warm without feeling too hot. Later in the night it did feel quite cool outside of the duvet, and like most nights recently, I turned the heater up full around 5am.

  I could try and describe the one dream I can remember lots of details about, but I think a simple description is easier. The dream was set in the place where I was a TV engineer for 6 years. I had a TV to repair, but it's insides were very weird. It had a CRT tube like I had never seen before, and that had obviously died because the glass had broken around a connector. The most notable thing about the dream was how the TV seemed to shrink in size as I wrapped it up in green clingfilm. It started at least 2ft wide, and by the time I had wrapped it had shrunk by over half in all directions. It ended up as no bigger than a large shoe box when I put it on the shelf for probable later disposal.

  I feel sure my newest blood glucose meter,  the cheap Chinese knock off, is faulty. Once again it gave a very high reading compared to the other two this morning. It said 9.8mmol/l, and that is high enough for continued concern. The other two meters gave 8.2mmol/l (the Nexus GlucoRX), and that reading is pretty good, although I might have hoped for something even lower considering what I ate yesterday. The other meter, the old Contour, gave a reading of 8.7mmol/l, and that is just high enough to warrant a small bit of care. Apart from Sino Care and it's probably wrong reading, it seems I am getting back to normal as I come to the end of healing all my bruises and scrapes.

  Today the main thing on the menu is my Wednesday lunch time drink. This morning I only had a single portion of instant noodles. I will have a second small portion before going to the pub. It is probably good practice to not drink on an empty stomach, although today I will be on my own, and will probably have no more than 2 pints of Guinness.