It looks wet outside after last night's rain, and that wetness will get topped up by more rain today. The most obvious change in the latest revision of the forecast, compared to the early version seen above, is that 4 and 5pm have changed to light rain and drizzle instead of grey and then mist. The temperature today is going to be a very flat - just 6° C at the ends, and 7° C for the middle. Tomorrow brings no hope of joy - more rain in the morning, and grey skies afterwards. Once again the maximum temperature will be just 7° C, and that for maybe only a few hours.

   Yesterday featured one triumph, and it turned out to be a triumph I should have experienced months ago. More about that later. One feature of yesterday was that I felt lousy. All my measurable health indicators said I was quite healthy, but I sometimes felt terrible. I guess it was low barometric pressure making bits ache.

  In one sense, the most significant event of yesterday happened just after 11am. I got a message from Alan, Jodie's boyfriend, to say her cold had returned, and this time it was a chest infection. She would obviously not be coming over for some beer tasting activities in the afternoon.  That was a shame, and I had even washed my hair, and had a full shower in preparation for a boozy session.

  However, there could have been an upside to it. I was, or could have been, free to go to Greenwich to see Lord Algea playing a gig in The Morden Arms. The band make a most pleasant racket, although the pub is usually uncomfortably busy. Unfortunately I couldn't even do that because I was awaiting an Amazon delivery. It arrivedat just after 3pm, and thatw as early enough that I could have gone to Greenwich, but by then I had got too settled into other stuff to go out.

  I think it was soon after I got the message about Jodie being ill that I had my triumph of the day. I had downloaded a couple of Linux distributions as iso images, and started to burn them to recordable DVD disks. My first attempt failed because the built in CD/DVD drive on my Dell computer has been unreliable for a long time. I had even ordered, but never fitted a new drive for it. My second attempt, using an external, USB connected and powered, CD/DVD recorder worked, but that external drive makes horrible grinding noises unless it sits on a completely flat and level surface.

  I decided the time had come to fit the new drive in my PC. I started by removing the printer balanced on top, and then swung the computer around so I could take off the side panel, and look inside. Once I saw inside I was reminded of how easy it was to get the old drive out. It is just one clip, and two leads to unplug. It was probably playing with fire, but SATA drive connections are supposed to be hot-swappable. So without powering the computer down, I unplugged the power and date leads to the drive, and flipped the catch to release the drive.

  The actual drive is clipped into a plastic carrier, and so with no screwdrivers needed, I unclipped the old drive, clipped in the new drive, and fitted it into the slot in the PC. After plugging in the two leads the job was done )apart from putting the side panel back on, and balancing the printer back on top of the PC. What a difference the new drive made. For one thing it was silent, and for another it was able to read a recordable DVD that I was close to throwing away.

  I did two transfers of video from home made DVDs. Over the years I think I lost the original sources of video i used for those two DVDs. I was able to smoothly rip all ten episodes of Fireball XL5 (in Supermarionation !!!) back to mp4 files, and then do the same for 5 episodes of Star Cops. The latter was probably a waste of time because I eventually got a DVD copy of all the nine episodes that were ever made. My original videos were digitised VHS tapes, although for some reason they did look pretty clean (apart from an occasional jiggle which proved they came from VHS tapes).

  While the DVD ripping was taking place I went downstairs to play with the iMac 8 on the dining room table. It was most convenient that I had warmed the dining room up originally for when Jodie came over, but the warmth was most welcome for playing with computers. I wanted to see if a different, or newer,  Linux distribution would solve the problem of things crashing when trying to play a high definition video.

  The first Linux I tried was a 32bit version of Mint Debian Edition. I think that had trouble booting properly, and so I next tried the very latest version of Linux Mint with the Xfce desktop. That seemed as if it might be good when run live from the DVD, and so I installed it. It installed OK, and presented a boot menu when started up for the first time from hard disk. One great thing is that being the same desktop, Xfce, it picked up all my customisations of the desktop from the previous installation.

  After installation came the usual updates. There were over 100 updates to download and install. Unlike stories I hear about Windows 10 and 11, updates don't take half a day or more, and need multiple reboots. It took about 15 minutes, and because there was a kernel update it recommended a restart as quickly as possible. It may have been a problem that I didn't do that.

  Instead of a reboot I opted for a few more updates that were offered, and one of them was either an update, or installing what looked like the correct drivers for the graphics processor in the iMac. After all the latest updates were installed I did the restart - and it failed ! All that came up was two lines of text, and the second line was complaining about not finding an initialization file. I felt I had already spent enough time on the PC in the dining room, and gave up on it for the day.

  Maybe I would have spent longer if I had got the room even warmer. I was definitely feeling under par for a lot of yesterday, and I am not sure why. At the top of the page I blamed low atmospheric pressure, plus maybe the general cold and damp feel to the day, even if it wasn't really cold and damp indoors, for some assorted aches and pains. It wasn't just joints aching though. I also had a very mild, but still very annoying headache, and other things I find hard to describe. I feel sure the weather played a huge part in it because i kept having fantasies about walking with bare arms and in shorts on a hot summers day !

  One other thing I did during the day was to prepare and cook a chicken and vegetable stew/casserole. As dinner time approached I didn't fancy it. What I seemed to fancy more was some beefburgers. I had a pack of 4 small burgers (or small after cooking) that I had bought from Aldi for no good reason, and they had to be used sooner or later.  I had them with a small tin of (Turkish ?) rissoles in beans. They were not ordinary baked beans but large beans in a sauce that may have had some tomato in it, but was possibly thickened bean "juice".  It was a nice, although not that wonderful, and not terribly healthy dinner.

  I was after some TV entertainment last night, and being a Sunday it was very thin pickings. I eventually found a program on Talking Pictures TV called The Baim Archive. If I understood correctly, "Baim" worked for one of the big English film studios, and when not working on big budget films, he would use the studio equipment to make documentaries. The one I watched was about a squadron of V bombers - England's nuclear defence aircraft. It was quite an intimate documentary following one group of men going through training to fly one of the V bombers. It was sort of clever how much it revealed and didn't reveal about a top secret project.

  After feeling up and down all day, it was good to get to bed last night. I slept with the heater on low all night despite last night's temperature not falling as low as previous nights. I think there was one period when I had about 20 minutes of insomnia in the night, but it all feels very hazy, and dreamlike now. My dreams, or which I can almost, but not quite remember quite a few, have also become rather hazy now.

  In fact I can only describe a bit of just one dream. It was an odd dream, and it is difficult to know what inspired it. The first bit I remember was that there was a flood, but not a bad one, although I suppose to see water coming out of Catford Bridge station was not very good. I decided to investigate. I had some sort of waterproof boots on, and so I walked into the station, and found not railway lines, but a river. It didn't seem very deep at all, and so I walked into it. The riverbed was a bit odd. As well as small rocks and gravel there seemed to be loads of sea shells.

  After a short, and quite crunchy walk, I came to a group of people I knew standing on a raised pile of rock and shells under a railway arch. They were urban explorers, and intended to explore further up the river. That sounded interesting, and I thought I would join them. We chatted about this and that for a while, but I have no idea what we talked about. We were just about to set off when I woke up. Anothe dream where a lot, but nothing happened.

  After my unhealthy dinner the night before, I knew my blood glucose readings would be higher than the last few good readings. However, they were still good, or at least less than typical averages. This time it was the Bayer Contour meter with the highest reading. It was a very typical 8.5mmol/l, and while less is always desirable, it was so close to average that I would not have taken any special precautions - particularly when the other two meters gave lower readings. The Nexis GlucoRX meter, the only one I relied on for a very long time, read just 7.9mmol/l, and that is very good. Finally the Sino Care meter gave a reading of 8.2mmol/l. Overall, I am still doing well.

  I have already done two things I wanted to do today. The first was a fairly decent poo (although I suspect there is more to come). The other thing was to phone the pharmacy to order my next repeat prescription. I got through first time, and it was suggested I could pick it up on Wednesday. That suits me fine. I can pick it up on the way home from my lunchtime visit to The Jolly Farmers on Wednesday. It is also about 5 days before I finish some of my existing drugs.

  Now the question is - what am I going to do today ? One thing I have to do is to finish washing a thick pair of what I think are called sweat pants. They are so heavy when dripping with water, and so hard to wring out, that I gave up on them putting them in for their second rinse. I was going to go back to them after an hour or so, but got distracted. I have to get them done today in case I need to use the bath for a shower - which I ought to do. Other than that, I have no idea what I will do today. The weather definitely puts me off leaving the house unless some very special reason crops up. I predict I will do a lot of reading, and maybe I'll watch a movie. I have one on an old DVD-R disk that may play OK on my new DVD drive in my computer.