Another mild night, and a 10° C start to the day. Both the BBC and Met Office agree that the first half of the day will be very grey, but the afternoon may only feature light cloud, albeit covering every inch of the sky. It should stay dry, but the temperature may only rise a single degree to 11° C. There is a difference of opinion about tomorrow. The BBC say lots of sunny spells. The Met Office say it will be a cloudy day. Both agree it will be cold with just 10° C possible. By the looks of it we will be getting some morning frosts at the end of the week.

   I had a major achievement yesterday, and maybe a few minor achievement, but the major achievement sticks out like a sore thumb in my mind - even if it seems petty to you. The key thing was washing my hair and having a good shower. After a day or two of being a complete slob, it felt great to be clean again.

  The start of the major achievement was straight after I had finished showering. I fill one of my big builders buckets with detergent, and plunged into it a double duvet cover. Fortunately it was one made from a fairly light grade of cotton, rather than the very thick one underneath it in the special wash basket. That heavy one will just have to wait until a warm sunny day, because there is no way I can ever wringing it out by hand enough to stop it dripping everywhere.

  Lifting the thin duvet cover out of the water was heavy enough lifting, and wringing it out was a struggle - particularly after the final, fabric conditioner phase. Trying to wring it out enough that it would not drip all over the carpet when hung on the clothes horse to dry, was quite a task, and there were still a few drips. I actually did the whole job in three stages with a rest between them. The first rest was after the detergent stage, and the next was before the fabric conditioner stage.

  I didn't do anything else that can remotely compare to that hand laundry, and I am almost left wondering what else I did do to pass the rest of the time. A bit of washing up, kitchen cleaning, and preparing my dinner was quite a minor task compared to that laundry.  The dinner I prepared was another lamb stew, cooked in the microwave with onion and red cabbage in it.

  One thing I did do, but usually for no more than 10 minutes at a time, was to read more from the book I am reading - all 1294 (from memory) pages of the Helliconia trilogy by Brian Aldiss. It make my arms and wrist hurt to raise that heavy book to reading level while laying in bed. I probably should read it sitting down with the book on a table, but for so long I have done all my reading while laying on, or in bed.

  As I think I remarked yesterday, I think I have managed to get through the most turgid part of the book. So far it has been like dungeons and dragons fantasy, with epic battles between primitive people, but increasing hints suggest it could take on a more SciFi appearance soon. Also as mentioned recently, probably yesterday, it is getting slightly easier to read in bed as the amount of read pages means the book is starting to get balanced between my left and right hands.

  There was one more significant task I did yesterday. It is a task I hate, and it could be easy to just keep putting it off, but that is just not practical. It was to pay my BT phone bill. It is always a very small amount because I am on a low user tariff, and it is easily afforded, but that still does mean I don't resent having to do it. The small amount of amusement is that my bank keeps putting up warning messages suggesting I am falling for a scam. It really does feel like it !

  Being a weekday night I watched the usual three Star Treks, except I didn't watch much of the first, the original series,  because it was not a great episode. Numbe 2, Deep Space Nine was another super crap episode about that bloody Bajor religion with it's prophets and emissaries. I can barely remember Star Trek: Voyager because that too was a very dull episode. The one thing I enjoyed was eating my dinner through the start of Deep Space Nine.

  I seem to think that maybe I was watched something after Voyager, but maybe what I am remembering is seeing something in the listings that might have been interesting. That could explain why I have no idea what it could be now because I went to bed instead. It took a fair time to get to sleep after I put my book down and turned out the lights. My sleep was not perfect, but better than the previous two nights.

  My best sleep may have been after I turned the heater on low at about 3am. I can remember feeling a bit cool in bed at first, but I woke up feeling far to hot, with sweat dampening my pillow at around 3am. It might seem illogical to turn the heating on then, but as the temperature in my bedroom started to rise I could leave an arm or two, and/or a leg or two uncovered to better regulate my temperature.

 At about 5am I turned the heater on full, and could partly kick the duvet aside as the room warmed up more. I think it was then that I had the only memorable dream of the night. Once again it was about being back at work, and this time work was repairing TVs again. It wasn't quite the same repair workshop because it had been altered in some way during the time I had been out of work after retiring.

  I was given an oldish CRT TV set to repair, and I diagnosed the problem as soon as I saw the picture on the screen. It was a simple stock fault - a dried up capacitor in the frame output stage. The only trouble was that I couldn't seem to find any spares, and no one seemed to be able to help me. My only recourse was to go to a local Maplin, Tandy, or similar store and buy the capacitor there.

  The component stores in the shop were very haphazard (so it was probably Tandy !). At one point a woman member of staff came over to help me. As we searched we got talking, and I said I would probably be sacked for what I was doing. She was very sympathetic about it as I told her I wasn't supposed to be repairing the TV, and should be scrapping such an old set, but that went against my views - why scrap an other wise perfectly good TV for the sake of a 50p capacitor ?  I got a hug for that, which was obviously very nice, but nothing more because I think that was when I woke up.

  This was another morning when I felt pretty bad when waking up, on the other hand, it was rather less bad than recent days. This morning my blood pressure (which I just checked a bit earlier in the morning than usual) is very good, but not particularly better than most mornings, and so unlikely to be source of improved feeling. I don't think my blood glucose level, which is very good again, has anything to do with some sort of improved feeling either.

  This morning all meters gave very nice low readings, although it was back to one of them being a bit different to the other two. The Sino Care meter said 8.0mmol/l, and the GlucoRX meter gave a similar reading of 7.8mmol/l. The Contour meter said just 7.1mmol/l, and if they had all said that it would have been excellent, but even the worst is still very good. It sounds very much like a paradox, but one big difference between what I consumed yesterday, and the day before, was several very strong beers. The lower readings were after the strong beers !

  I know of two events happening today. One should be an Amazon parcel delivery. That is very likely to mid to late afternoon. That gives me plenty of time to have a quick rest after writing all this, and then going to Tesco for some more stuff for dinner. Apart from that, I am not sure what other stuff I may end up doing.