The sun is up, and a bright glow can be seen behind nearby houses to the east. With luck it should stay sunny through all the hours of daylight. The wind is still from the north east, straight from more polar regions, but it may be lighter today, and the brief spell at 5° C (for just a single hour in the latest revision) may feel merely bloody cold instead of bloody freezing !!! Tomorrow morning should be sunny again, although after a few hours it will just be sunny spells until thicker cloud, early in the afternoon, turn it into a very dull day. It is possible the temperature may briefly touch 6° C late in the afternoon.

    Yesterday was a sort of medium OK sort of day. It seemed to get off to a great start thanks to the sunshine, but as soon as I went outside, even wearing my second warmest winter coat, the blast of icy feeling air made it feel very cold outside. I had a vague plan to possibly go out shopping twice yesterday, but one shopping trip in that icy blast put me off going out again.

  My one shopping trip was to Tesco. I had some definite items on my shopping list that I wanted, and I got those. That list even included a vague idea of getting something like southern fried flavour chicken, but not the legs and breast that I got last time because they were horrid. The one thing I shouldn't have bough was a pack of two cheese and ham pastie like things, but they were half price, and into the basket they went.

  One disappointment was that Tesco had virtually no whiskies on heavy Clubcard discount. They did have an expensive single malt whisky with a useful discount on it, but I am wary of single malt whiskies. For some they are the best whiskies, but I just don't care for many of them. I prefer blended whiskies. They tend to be less harsh, and a lot less smoky than many single malt whiskies.

  Thanks to the vicious wind I felt quite chilled when I got home from Tesco's, and that seemed to trigger inverting my eating for the day. I don't mean inverting as in vomiting, but having dinner for lunch, and lunch for dinner. I had bought a pack of frozen chicken "steaks" made from compressed but of meat, coated with " fiery hot" breadcrumbs (but was actually so mild I added some chilli sauce halfway through eating them.

  It was a long wait for those chicken "steaks" to cook from frozen, and I ended up scoffing the pack of two cheese and ham pasties. They were almost nice, and could have been nicer if warmed up.....on the other hand, some pasties seem to taste worse, and go all gloopy when warmed up. One thing for certain was that eating those and the chicken steaks must have been a bad idea.....but in the long run, maybe not.

  I spent most of the afternoon with the heater often turned up high, while laying on my bed reading and snoozing. I'm not sure if I actually snoozed much. A lot of the time I just thing I had my eyes closed, desperately trying to imagine that the sunshine coming through the windows was warm sunshine, and that it might be like summer. of course that was just pure insanity as my electric bill will probably prove.

  Life became worse when The Legend Channel (on Freeview) showed an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series that seemed like a repeat from only about a fortnight ago. Sometimes, maybe many times, it seems Legend only bought the rights to a single season of Star Trek, and just keep playing those few episodes over and over again. In the next hour I flipped back and forth between Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Enterprise. It was a bit annoying in that neither was a great episode, and neither was a particularly bad episode.

  In that second hour of Star Trek I ate my lunch. It should have been a much lighter meal, but it ended up closer to, or worse than a dinner. I started off with a single, medium sized bowl of instant noodles because I though something hot might be good. I then had some rice crackers with some hot pepperami. I then had a third part of this late and extended lunch. It flipped all before on it's head. It was a tub of low sugar (and calories) ice cream. Ice cream in mid winter may be a bit odd, but it was very enjoyable. It was my last tub, left over from the summer.

  I finished the evening watch two episodes of QI (one being a QIXL), and an edition of Have I Got News For You. That took me up to 11pm, and I should have gone straight to bed to sleep, but I didn't. Having finally finished Brian Aldiss's "Heliconia Trilogy", and never to read it again because I can't say I enjoyed more than a few pages form the total of 1274, I decided to at least read the introduction to the book I pictured yesterday - the book "Roving Mars".

  It didn't take reading many pages to realise I was going to like the book a lot. The writer, Steve Squyres, seems to have simplified some of the technical information, but there is still plenty to get your teeth into. The start of the book is how he tried to get ion board with the planning of the Mars Rovers, but first he, as a scientist, backed by some very skilled engineers, tried to build a new type of camera to go on one of a possible 16 rovers that were originally going to go to Mars.

  His team got off to a bad start when they mixed up the length and height of the camera to fit NASA's specifications. That is as far as I got in the story, but getting there also included a basic  description of the camera they wanted to make. It was to be more scanner than camera, and I know that a later version was actually used on Mars. The electronic sensor was more like the scanning head of a document scanner. It viewed the outside through a narrow slit on a revolving tube. The picture was then built up in computer memory as the slit scanned the outside world.

  That basic idea was great fodder for a dream last night. In the dream the writer was demonstrating it to NASA officials. The writer was wearing a full biological isolation garment, and the reason was not obvious at first. The reason was that somehow he knew that one of the men from NASA was suffering bad flatulence. One of the features of the camera was that inside the tube with the slit there was another tube with colour filters in it. As well as red, green and blue, there were filters for various infra red wavelengths, as well as ultra violet wavelengths.

  It just so happened that one of the infra red filters was tuned to the absorption wavelength of sulphurous gases. The camera picked up a great representation of the man from NASA surrounded by a cloud of fart gas that was computer rendered in pale green. The reason for the biological isolation suit was so there could be no doubt where the gaseous emissions came from. Once the picture was taken the suit was taken off.

  It may not have been the greatest way to impress an official, but it seemed very funny in my dream. I'm not sure if I was awake, or dreaming, when I spent a bit more time thinking about the design of the camera. With the help of some skilled engineers, and skilled programmers I reckon I could design the building blocks of such a camera, but leave the fine details to the experts.

  On the whole I slept well last night. waking up at about 4am was a good idea so I could turn the heater up full. With my outside temperature sensors showing it to be zero degrees outside it was rather cool indoors as well.  Even after the heater had been running on full for a few hours it was still a bit of a shock to the system to get out from my warm bed. It was even a bigger shock to go to the bathroom. It is freezing in there.

  As yet I have not done a poo, but despite that my weight remains slightly lower than it was weeks or months ago. Also, despite my odd eating yesterday, my blood glucose readings were still not too bad, and could even be said to be good. The Contour meter read 7.9mmol/l, and I regard any reading starting with a 7 to be good. The GlucoRX meter was even better at 7.3mmol/l. The Vivachek meter typically read higher, but at 8.0mmol/l, not that different to the Contour meter.  It all gives me hope that in warmer months I can eat less and exercise more, and get much better figures than these.

    The main item on the menu today is to go for my usual Wednesday lunchtime Guinness in The Jolly Farmers. I think with the temperature so low I may well put on my very thickest winter coat - the bright orange one with the hood to keep my ears warm, or more typically to keep my head dry in rain, sleet or snow - none of which is expected today.  I think I'll be on my own there today, but you never know....