There was some glorious sunshine when I opened the curtains soon after 8am, but despite the forecast saying it should last until 9am, it seems the sky has clouded over now, and this dullness could last all day. It may only be broken by light showers at 4pm. It was quite a mild night, and the temperature was 11° C  at 8am. The temperature may briefly peak at 14° C. Tomorrow could start very wet, but most of tomorrow may be dry, but very dull. It will be cooler too. Just 11° C  is forecast.

   First things first: The final result of the great experiment was that washing a grey t-shirt with a brand new black sheet (see yesterday's picture) was not entirely worthless. The grey t-shirt is still a grey t-shirt, but if I stare at it hard I can make myself believe it is a very, very slightly darker shade of grey now. Another hundred washed with another hundred new black items should do the trick !

  Yesterday involved a few minor triumphs. One of the first was to design a new set of icons for my web pages. Maybe that wasn't a complete triumph because they don't look as good as I hoped they would, but I think I thought that about this years icons, and I have learned to just ignore them as anything arty - they just serve the purpose they were intended to, a thing to click on to take you to a new page.

  One thing I did was extremely annoying on several levels. It started when I found a cassette tape of the band Atom Heart Mother recorded on Jodie's Walkman when we saw them in The George Robey pub back in 1993. The first aggravation is that the only music editor I can find on Linux is Audacity. It is, or should be, possible to listen what you are recording, but if that option is turned on recording stops so quickly all you hear is a click.

  At least that is the case on my main PC. It does sometimes work on the computer in the dining room, but even that can be flaky. Once it has recorded/digitised the tape, the next aggravation is editing. To be honest it's user interface is not terribly good for doing anything more than top and tailing (cutting out dead time at the start and end), and maybe stitching different recordings together. It even has a comprehensive set of effects you can use, but one simple effect is almost impossible.

  That simple effect is to cover up a gap in, say, the left channel (caused by a faulty plug or socket during the original recording) by using the right channel to fill the gap. I did eventually manage it, but it was so hard to copy and paste to exactly the right place because of the poor user interface. Most times I tried it I just ended up with the bit of the stereo pair out of sync, and sounding like an echo. One other way was to convert the stereo to mono so a missing bit would just sound like a slight drop in volume, but the only time that could be done was when exporting to an mp3 file, and so not being able to hear it until the mono file was played back in another player.

  Once upon a time I had a computer that dual booted either Linux or Windows XP. I had Cool Edit Pro installed on Windows, and that, once you have got familiar with it, is so great to use. I used to be able to edit out a single click on recordings of music on Vinyl. Copying and pasting from one stereo channel to the other was as easy as copying and pasting a word in a word processor.

  Anyway, I got the cassette recording converted to an mp3 audio file in the end. It was far from perfect, but it is still a little blast of nostalgia, and I am sure Jodie will enjoy listening to it again, although Michael, who like all music, will probably be very underwhelmed by it. I then spent a fair bit of time making sure that all music stored on my main PC was backed up on one of my two music backup disks. One of today's job will be to make sure the master and slave backup disks are in sync.

  I made another Amazon order yesterday. I was triggered to do it by finding the Power Over Ethernet power injector for my garden camera had died over night. I ordered two new ones....just in case, and also because they seemed to be nearly half the price that I seem to remember spending on the original. I also ordered a new mixer tap for the kitchen sink to replace the one that is now beyond repair. The one I ordered is identical to the existing one. I thought that would simplify things if I got a plumber in to do the replacement, but I am increasingly thinking I can do it myself.

  There were probably a few other little things I did yesterday because the day seemed to slip away quite easily. One thing I did seem to do was a sort of anti thing - eating very little because of my high blood glucose readings in the morning. As dinner time approached I went down to the kitchen to prepare a sort of home made shish kebab. I don't have a charcoal grill, and I don't have any skewers, but what I cooked in the mini oven/grill was a mix of chicken, chunks of onion, and bell pepper. I think some places call a special chicken kebab.

  It was quite tasty, but ideally I would have used less onion, and added something like mushrooms. Too much onion seemed great at first, but it almost gave me heartburn as I burped onion taste for the rest of the evening. There were gigs I could have gone to last night, but I didn't really even give them a thought - particularly after dark when I closed to curtains, and ignored the outside world.

  What I did end up doing was watching a lot of TV last night. I think I started with a documentary about our wartime defenses, and how they ended up as nuclear shelters. They showed several long disused nuclear missile launch bases. The inside of a nuclear bunker up in Scotland, and lots of other interesting stuff. I then turned over to BBC2 who were devoting most of the evening celebrating the close ties between Blondie (Debby Harry and band) and the BBC. I watched two programmes. One was about the band and the BBC, and the other was mostly about the people involved with Blondie - journalists, photographers, and "super fans".

  During the course of a few hours of programming they showed grainy footage of Blondie performing as just "another local band" playing in the CBGB club in New York, and Blondie on the stage of Glastonbury this very year. I knew the band had resurfaced, but I was surprised to see them at Glastonbury. they sounded good, and it looked like the crowd loved it. It is amazing to think that Deborah Harry is 78 this year, and still performing.

  It must have been getting on for 11pm when I got to bed last night. Once again I didn't sleep very well. I can remember lots of time when after waking up it took ages to get back to sleep again. One thing that would probably have been better would have been if I had turned off the heater instead of leaving it on low. It was the old story of it feeling far too hot under the duvet, and in the case of last night, just very slightly too cool to sleep even partly uncovered.

   Most of my sleep was probably done half or more uncovered, and maybe that was instrumental in some bad dreams. Maybe "annoying dreams" is a better description than bad. I kept having dreams about changing taps and other plumbing stuff. None of those dreams featured any disasters, but most featured difficulties. The worst thing was that every time I closed my eyes I seem to see a repeat, or a variation of the same dream over and over again.

  Like the previous night (or the one before) I woke up as usual at 6am, and turned the heater up full. I hoped I could kick off the duvet and get another 90 minutes of good sleep, but that didn't really happen this morning. I evidently did sleep because there were chunks of missing time, but by about 8am it didn't feel like I had got any good sleep, and I wasn't going to get any more sleep. It was time to get up, and I felt crap in many ways - mostly the usual ways.

  At least this morning there was some good news. When I went to check my blood glucose I remembered to set the lancet in the finger pricking tool to go a little deeper to make it easier to squeeze out a big bead of blood. This morning all three meters closely agreed with each other, and all gave a good reading. I got figures of 8.1, 8.2. and 8.4mmol/l. The lowest was the Sino Care meter, and the highest was the Contour meter.

  I have no idea what I am going to do today - except for making sure my two music files back up disks are in sync with each other. At the moment, in defiance of the weather forecast, the sun is shining again. There is some heavy looking cloud on the northern horizon, but overhead the sky is blue, and the cloud is very broken to the south. It is almost as if it is tempting me to go out, but I think this pleasant bit of sunshine could all be over in a few tens of minutes. It is doubtful, but not impossible I might go out. I'll just play it by ear.