There are two versions of today's weather forecast. There is the Met Office version shown above, and then there is the BBC version which shows loads of sunshine or sunny spells through all hours of daylight. Looking at the sky I can see some small breaks in the cloud, which looks ominously grey just 14 minutes after sunrise, and so maybe the sun may break through for a short sunny spell later. Otherwise today could be a slightly less miserable day than yesterday because the cloud is a lighter grey....or may end up that way a bit later. Today's temperature profile looks almost flat - starting at 9° C, and then rising to10° C for the rest of the day.  While the forecasters disagree about today, they seem to agree that tomorrow will mostly feature light grey cloud, but with some darker clouds now and then, and they also agree on light rain for 8pm, and an afternoon temperature of 12° C.

   Yesterday was another very quiet day when not a lot happened. Tesco's banking website was working again, and I paid of my Tesco credit card bill. Perhaps that was the most satisfying things yesterday, but I did do a couple more jobs. One was laundry, and the other was washing up and cooking.

  The most significant thing about yesterday was not exactly a new ailment, but the return of one at a much higher strength. I think I first noticed it when standing up after I finished writing yesterday. I became very acutely aware that my right knew was very painful. After that it got worse, and I had to grit my teeth when I was walking up and down stairs. That knee has ached before, but not for a long time, and never at yesterday's level before.

  It is hard to say what caused it. As far as I am aware I hadn't knocked it, or subjected it to any special wear and tear. The obvious candidate was the weather, and although I was mostly insulated from it, being indoors all day, and with the heater on to keep me warm, it still seems likely that it was the weather. Maybe the barometer reached a new low, or high, or something - perhaps it was a very rapid change that caused it. Maybe it is just my knee joint wearing too thin.

  One thing that did help, although it wasn't until I had eaten dinner that I tried it, was a couple of NSAID tablets (non steroidal ant-inflammatory drugs - aka Ibuprofen). There was a definite improvement after about an hour, although maybe it was getting better by itself by then. By the time I had gone to bed the pain was sufficiently low enough to almost ignore. This morning I am aware of some residual pain when, for instance, going down stairs, but it is not enough to worry me.

  Apart from reading many pages, usually about 5 at a time before I had to put the heavy book down, I did one other thing that was a definite "thing". I half caught up with a backlog of laundry. I hand washed two t-shirts, and maybe 5 pairs of underpants. I could have managed a little more, but what I did seemed to be about half of what was in the laundry basket. After leaving it all to soak for a few hours I finished the job in one go - although I was tempted to do it in two shifts, but I knew that could have tempted me to leave it half finished until, perhaps, today.

  My lunch was "mixed sausage slices" on rice  crackers. The big problem was that the three very similar types of "mixed sausages" were pale and tasteless. To be honest they were like thinly sliced slices of Spam, but Spam would have had far more flavour. I felt very unsatisfied with that as a lunch, and topped it up with some sugar free "fibre" biscuits with cheese on them.

  My dinner, eaten earlier than usual at about 5.45pm, was a couple of pork steaks (at least I think they were described as steaks) cooked on a bed of sprouts. If there was one thing wrong with this dinner it was that I had let it cool down too much before eating it. I suppose the other thing was that the pork was quite a dense meat, and didn't really match the texture of the sprouts. I still enjoyed it.

  I had a surprisingly emotional sort of night. Being a Saturday, there was no Star Treks to watch, but from 6 or 7pm Sky Arts were doing a short evening of Pink Floyd stuff. I say short evening because before the three Pink Floyd programmes, there was other stuff before and after. The Pink Floyd segment started with a concert from The Delicate Sound Of Thunder era. That was followed by two more programmes.

  They were both documentaries. The first was about Dark Side Of The Moon. I had probably seen it a few times before, and even if it was not the exact same documentary, it was still based on all the same archive material. Some of the songs from that album touched me in different ways over the years, and they still provoke a sort of happy sadness - if that makes any sense...

  The second documentary was about the making of the album Wish You Were Here. Once again there were some songs, or more truly, a few lines of verse in some songs that really tickled the emotional parts of my brain. One such couple of lines from the title song are "We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl......". When I first ever heard that it seemed to match my situation at the time, and many years later I even bought a t-shirt with those lyrics on it. I last wore it when I went to Jo's solo gig last Sunday.

  I can't remember if it was 10pm or 11pm before I went to bed last night, but what I do remember is that my brain had been stirred up, and it took a long time to relax. Once I did, maybe around midnight, I started to sleep almost really well. At a little after 2am I had a short period of insomnia, but generally I seemed to sleep well all night. Maybe I was just too relaxed to remember any more of my dreams than a thread where I was looking at some PC, or TV monitors, and marvelling that I could add a layer of information over the pictures. What those pictures were, and what the information was is lost to the mists of time.

  One thing I did an hour or so after having my dinner was to have a nibble on some German sliced salami. It was nice and spicy, but I think it left it's mark on my blood glucose readings this morning. They were still good, but I had hoped for better. I had quite a range of readings, 8.4mmol/l, 8.2mmol/l, and 8.0mmol/l. All those were slightly below average, but the GlucoRX meter gave an extremely good 6.7mmol/l. The evidence of the other three meters is that the GlucoRX meter gave an incorrect reading. It would have been nice if it were true though.

  This morning I can still feel some very mild soreness from my right knee, but compared to yesterday, it is nothing, of no consequence......but, I guess it remains as a reminder that I have a family history of arthritic/rheumatic knees, and I guess I'll have more episodes like yesterday until one day the pain won't go away, and it will be time to see a sawbones to hopefully sort it out.

  What was a painful bother this morning was stomach pain. It was like very bad constipation until it most definitely wasn't. It was only a few paragraphs ago that I started going to the toilet at 5 minute intervals. Mostly I passed wind until the visit before last. On that occasion, with no fanfare or drama, I went almost normally, like any other morning, although the end was a bit uncertain. I came back to my PC, and almost before I could sit down at the keyboard I was rushing back to the toilet for another very productive visit. I am not 100% sure I have finished, but I am now comfortable again.

  The picture on the left has nothing to do with my bottom at all. (For one thing I did not have an ultra hot phall curry last night). What it shows is a "repaired" candle. The candle was a cherry scented candle in something like a jam jar. It was quite annoying in that as it burned down it left a very thick ring of wax around the inside of the jar.

  When the wick had burnt down almost to the bottom I "repaired" it by pushing a small candle down into the liquid wax, and lit that. It set the wax around the inside of the jar dripping down  to feed the new wick. When that wick had burnt down to the bottom I did the same thing again, putting another small candle into the hot wax at the bottom.

  It never managed to consume all the wax stuck on the glass, but I reckon it consumed over half of it before I gave up on it. I think with its added smaller candles, that candle jar burnt non stop for about 3 days. This morning it finally went out, and I have started the process of cleaning the jar for some possible re-use. I filled it to the brim with boiling water to melt the wax, and let it float to the top of the water.  A few more treatments like that, and then a good scrubbing should give a sparkling clean jar with an air tight stopped for something.

  In theory I could be semi busy today. Once I have showered, and possibly washed my hair, I have a second lot of laundry to do. I have some tidying up, and cleaning to do in the dining room in preparation for another boozing session with Jodie, and probably Alan (who might have the Apple PC he has threatened to dump on me). I will also prepare and precook my dinner so I don't have to think about it after several or more, sometimes very strong, beers.