It is most definitely wet outside, and yet the rain does not seem to be very heavy. The good news is that the latest revision to the forecast shows the rain finishing for the day at midday. It will still be quite dull until sunset, but no rain is still an improvement. The temperature may reach 13° C for a few hours in the early afternoon - which is good, but apart from saving a tiny bit of electricity, is almost useless. Tomorrow should be brighter, and there might even be a sunny spell, but there could be one or two isolated showers as well. 10° C is the best that can be expected tomorrow.

    Yesterday definitely had it's moments. I did some useful stuff, but by the afternoon it was starting to get a bit boring. On the plus side it was a modestly healthy day, although my resolve was crumbling a bit by late afternoon. Some of what I was doing may sound like a New Years resolution, but I was merely addressing specific problems.

  As I think I mentioned yesterday, I started the day with a single, but I confess, a large bowl of instant noodles. I washed them down with the rest of a glass of Diet Coke I had been drinking. From then on, until dinner time, I drank nothing but chilled water. My aim was to help flush out whatever was affecting my guts. I think it helped, but it wasn't a complete cure.

  Yesterday (or maybe the day before) I mentioned that the price of gas and electricity went up yesterday, and so it felt important to try and reduce my consumption. I did two things to help this idea along. Soon after breakfast I turned the heating off. I also searched for, and found, a warm, long sleeved fleece type top. It is in pretty poor condition. Most of it has gone all "bobbally", and it looks like it would benefit from a shave. I can remember seeing adverts in magazines for a tool that did claim to shave bobbles off, but I have no idea how effective it would be. I think I shall just label this fleece as indoors, in private, only.

  This fleece does keep my torso, and arms warm, but no heating makes everything feel cold to my also cold hands. Until the temperature plunges below zero I think I'll draw the line about wearing gloves indoors. In such circumstances I will put the heating on again during the day, and maybe even turn it up high ! I think I would also be a lot less inclined to fast on such days. Yesterday I managed to fast until I gave in and had a snack at about 4pm.

  Doing laundry by hand is a way of keeping warm - particularly with my hands in medium hot water ! Yesterday I hand washed a pair of t-shirts and a pair of a pair of underpants. (Can you have a pair of a pair ???). With only four items I did the whole lot from detergent to fabric conditioner, with three rinses between, in one non stop session. I then hung them on the big clothes horse in the front room with just a desk fan blowing at them to speed up the drying - although it still took the rest of the day, plus overnight, and I'm not sure it is all bone dry even this morning.

  Straight after the laundry I did a little tidying up in the front room. It was mainly a case of cutting up a big box that my last beer delivery came in. I sliced it into flat sheets before putting it in the recycling bin. What I still have is the fibrous/compressed paper things that hold the bottles. I think they would, once cut into individual "pots" be good for filling with compost to get seedlings started for the garden. That compressed paper type stuff should decompose by itself once planted in the ground.

  The final thing before I took a break was to do a bit of washing up, and then prepare my dinner for the evening. Stage one of dinner was to mostly cook some diced lamb in some water, stock cubes, and some rosemary. Later in the afternoon I prepared some sprouts, and added those to the lamb and stock, for a spell in the microwave. As dinner time approached I gave it 6 or 7 extra minutes in the microwave to get it nice and hot.

  Most of my afternoon was not enjoyable. Drinking only water, and fasting was not exactly thrilling, but doing it in the cold was even worse. However, it was not terrible, and I expect I'll be doing the same again today. While laying down, quietly reading, or even trying to snooze, I did feel the cold - although mainly it was my hands feeling a bit cold, and stuff I was touching felt cold. Curiously enough, it was knowing it was cold that was worse than actually feeling cold.

  With dinner getting closer and closer, I gave in on the fasting early. I had a handful of peanuts, plus a chunk of cheese. It would have been easy to have more, but that seemed to be the minimum to take my mind off feeling hungry. Fortunately it wasn't long before the first Star Trek: The Original Series started at 5pm. It was a classic episode, "The Gamesters Of Triskelion", in which Kirk, Uhura, and Chekov are captured by "brains in bottles" and forced to fight while the brains bid on the outcomes. One of the better episodes.

 I ate my dinner while watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was a rather ridiculous story, heavily borrowing on Isaac Asimov's "Fantastic Voyage" - which I have just this minuted learned was not originally conceived by Asimov, although he did write the novel based on the screen play. Anyway, the Deep Space Nine version was complete twaddle, but amusing in places. It finished at 7pm, and I then spent the next hour reading until the next TV entertainment.

  That next entertainment was a repeat of "Secrets Of The London Underground". Being a repeat it lost some of it's impact, but was still a bit interesting. After that finished I watched an episode of QIXL. It wasn't a great episode, but better than some. One other thing I did in that hour between TV programmes was to go to the toilet - twice in quick succession. I suppose it was about an hour after eating my dinner that my guts started to ominously rumble, and so started a double portion of diarrhoea.

  There is definitely something wrong with my guts, but maybe they are getting better. At least I wasn't sitting on the toilet at midnight like the previous night. It would have been a very awkward time for it if I had been out, but it was probably triggered by my hot dinner, and maybe beer wouldn't have been a trigger if I was out....but who knows. I am just happy that I was at home, alone, with a good supply of toilet paper !

   After watching QIXL (at least I think it was an XL edition) I went straight to bed. I was feeling fairly sleep, and I didn't try and read more than two pages of the book I am reading, although that was mainly because two pages took me to the end of the chapter. I should mention at this point that I had turned the heater on low at about 5pm, and I left it on during the night, but still on low until about 5am when I turned it up so I could later get up to a nice warm room.

  Assuming I would have no more trouble with my guts for the rest of the night, I was able to relax and fall asleep quite quickly once I turned out the light. Although the heater was keeping the chill at bay, it was still cool enough in my bedroom that I had to sleep completely under the duvet all night. I think it was 1 or 2am when I woke up and turn the pillow around because I had overheated and sweated a bit. Last night was another night when I remember dreaming a lot, but can't remember a single thing about those dreams.

  This morning brought the proof that some of my suffering yesterday was good for me. The Contour blood glucose meter said my blood glucose was just a magnificent 6.7mmol/l. The other two meters also showed similar low readings, but not quite as good. The GlucoRX meter said 7.1mmol/l, and the Sino Care meter said 7.4mmol/l. I am aiming for similar readings tomorrow, but whether my discipline holds on such a cold, wet and gloomy day seems unlikely, but I will do my best.

  After my two visits to the toilet yesterday evening, nothing has happened this morning, except...Maybe an hour after eating my hot bowl of instant noodles (just one this morning, but it was a 100gm packet) my guts started to rumble. All is still not well down there, and maybe it won't be too long before I am rushing to the toilet again. Hopefully that won't be the case, although the pessimist option is that it will happen tonight in the middle of a TV programme or something.

  Two things I will do today will be to turn the heater on again, and turn it to high. This is so the second thing  will do ends in a more comfortable way. I didn't have one yesterday, but today I definitely want to have a shower. I don't want to come back to a cold bedroom after I leave the shower. I shall turn the heater off again once I am dressed, and will try and leave it off until late this afternoon at the earliest.

  Other than those couple of things I have no idea what I shall do today.  Maybe there is one thing I will do, and that is to go to a "hole in the wall" cash machine and withdraw some "beer vouchers". I have been meaning to do this since early last December. Today could be the day ! Maybe I'll look in the secondhand shop near the Tesaco cash machine on the hight street to see if there is anything tempting in there. A new camera maybe.....no, that would be silly because I have all the cameras I may ever need.....unless it was some special camera or lens.