While yesterday was very cold, today will be very very cold ! There has been no sign of the forecast mist, but the latest revision to the forecast says the mist will now only appear at 11am. After that the sun may break through for a few hours, and at 3pm, with full sunshine pouring down, the temperature will reach it's highest point of the day at 2° C !!!! More of the day will be just 0° C. Tomorrow the temperature should reach the glorious heights of 7° C, but it will be a wet and rainy day. The BBC predicts it could be a very, very wet day !

   Yesterday was a mostly unpleasant day. The reason was the extreme cold (and today is going to be worse). The highlight of the day was a shopping trip to Aldi, but breathing in the icy air had it's consequences. I can even be accused of not wrapping up warm. I had my very warmest, hooded winter coat on, and was sweating by the time I had carried my heavy shopping home.

 I suspect that the icy air was beginning to affect me before I realised it because I bought some things that I knew were not good for me - things like ready made sandwiches and a triple cheese quiche. Most of what I bought was otherwise sensible.  Of course the 4 bottles of beer and a bottle of Aldi own brand whisky don't count in the good or bad decisions ! It was on the way to Aldi that I encountered "extreme weather".

  It was about midday when I walked to Aldi. I had only been walking for about a minutes when I observed a snowflake. The early version of the weather forecast did predict light snow at 11am and midday. I noticed that the tops of the wheelie bins were wet when I first went out, but I can't say is that was rain, sleet or snow. What I saw during my walk was definitely snow - there just was not much of it. Within a visual range of 3 or 4 ft (maybe further) I saw a single snowflake fall about every 3 or 4 seconds !

  My winter coat definitely kept my body warm, and with the extra effort of carrying two moderately heavy shopping bags, plus a heavy rucksack, I was sweaty when I got home, but, and it is a big BUT, I had been breathing in icy cold air. The result was a wheeziness that took until early evening to fade away. I don't think that was relevant to feeling cold all day. A single 2kW fan heater was struggling to keep my bedroom warm.

  It was lucky that yesterday morning saw the arrival of my latest statements/bills from EDF energy. My gas was well in credit, and so was my electricity - all thanks to increasing my monthly standing orders to silly amounts. The intended purpose was to build up credit for the winter, and I seem to have done well at that. On top of that was the £500 winter fuel payment on top of my state pension. Provided winter does not stay too extreme for too long, I might even end up still in credit when spring starts - even without having to be too frugal about using the heating I need to stay warm.

  After putting my shopping away I ate the two packs of sandwiches I had bought. One used a wholemeal like bread, and the sugar content was medium. The other, a triple pack, was white bread, and I was too scared to check the sugar content. I think I barely made it through to 4pm before I was scoffing the triple cheese quiche I bought. That looked like it was moderately low in sugar until I looked more closely, and saw it was per quarter of the quiche, and I scoffed the whole lot. What made that worse was that it wasn't even very nice. I suspect it would have been nicer to eat it cold.

  By 5pm it was time to watch some Star Trek, and to have the first of three large whiskies. That booze helped my warm up, and it was possibly instrumental in finally killing the wheeziness. The odd thing about that feeling of wheeziness was that it didn't seem to affect my oxygen input. My Pulse Oxymeter said I was still easily getting 98% blood oxygenation. I think the cold air may have only inflamed the very top of my windpipe rather than anything lower or the lungs.

  At about 6pm, with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine starting, I had my proper dinner. It was 6 giant sized cod fish fingers, and nothing else apart from a squeeze of low sugar ketchup. I oven cooked them, as suggested, but I feel sure they would have been much nicer if deep fat fried in oil and fat flavoured with previous cooking. Deep Space Nine seemed very tedious, and I ended up watch the last three quarters of Star Trek: Enterprise.

  The final Star Trek of the day, Voyager, was typically pretty tedious, and I switched over to watch The Simpsons on Channel 4+1. My TV watching didn't stop there, and I watched Secrets Of The London Underground on Yesterday. It was a repeat that I seemed quite familiar with, but still partly interesting. That finished at 9pm, and I went straight to bed. I think I read half a dozen pages before falling asleep.

  On the whole I seemed to sleep well last night. I kept the heater on low in the build up to bed time, and only changed things sometime after 3am when I turned the heater up full. I think it was just before 2am when I woke up from a possibly short, but full of detail, dream. It could have been an erotic dream if it were not the case that the dream had no privacy. The dream was set in someone's house or flat, possibly in West London.

  I think the idea was that we were staying over night to go to a gig the next day. "We" were about 7 people, and one or two were from a band, but I don't seem to know what the band was. Another person would seem to have been my younger sister, and another was possibly Angela, or at least she had some similarities with Angela - one of which was quite specific. There were no bed for us in the room we were staying in, and we had to sleep on the floor under a blanket.

  The floor was not hard, but not soft enough to be a mattress, or maybe three large mattresses used sideways, and the "floor" didn't seem to be cold - once again as if we were on something soft, but thin. We were all going to sleep alternately up and down, or head to feet. I made sure I was to sleep next to the Angela like person because we were very close, and almost intimate with each other.

  One reason why I think it was Angela, despite her having no name, and maybe not identical to Angela in every way, was that one form of intimacy we had shared, was giving her a foot massage (that happened in real life), and in the dream it was handy to have her feet pointing towards me so I could massage her feet, and stroke her legs in the night. If we had not been surrounded by Maybe 5 other persons we might have gone further....

  I doubt that dream lasted more than a minute, although time in the dream was possibly 10 minutes, but it was very rich in detail - not that I can remember more than a tenth of that detail. It was probably good it ended when it did before any frustration started !  I can remember a single scene of another dream. In this dream I was visiting Kevin to look at a circuit board he had designed and built. I have no idea what it did, but it seemed to be a nice job he had done.

  I didn't really intend to sleep until just gone 7am this morning. There was a potential reason to get up a bit earlier, but I'll come to that soon. After knowing I had eaten very badly yesterday, I was very apprehensive about checking my blood glucose. I was very happy that I used the blood glucose meters in the order that I did. I started with the Contour meter, and it read 8.0mmol/l. That was far lower than I expected. The GlucoRX meter confirmed that low reading with an even lower reading of 7.9mmol/l. That seemed little short of a miracle.

   For reasons unknown, the Sino Care meter gave more the sort of reading I was fearing, 9.2mmol/l. There could be a pattern developing here. The last 5 or 6 test strips from the previous canister of test strips seemed to start giving very high readings. It is as if the test strips are degraded by too much exposure to, possibly, atmospheric moisture. I keep the cannister closed except to take out a new test strip, but maybe those few seconds are that is needed for moisture to build up. The Contour and GlucoRX test strip cannisters have an absorbent surface to soak up possible impurities, but I don't think the Sino Care cannisters have anything beyond a circle of cardboard in the lid.

  I could be going to an outside Xmas gig in Hither Green today, but I have doubts I will. One good enough reason is that I seem to have gone round the cycle again, and I am back on the constipated bit of the circle of life. I don't really feel uncomfortable, but I know that sooner or later then "dam will burst" and I would rather like to be my own toilet when it does. A second very good reason is that with it being only 1° C at midday, I think I prefer to stay in the warm.  I haven't ruled out going to enjoy, and photograph a bit of Chain at The Railway in Blackheath tonight, but that feels quite unlikely too.