Today;'s forecast has already been revised to be rather different. It now shows light cloud until after sunset, but when I look out the window it is obvious no one told the weather what it was supposed to do. I think I would call the sky a mid grey colour ! The sunny spell shown for 2pm has been removed in the latest revision, and 5pm is now shown as light rain. What hasn't changed is that the temperature should peak for maybe 4 hours at 6° C. Tomorrow may be bright and sunny, but it is going to be perishingly cold. The day may start at 0° C, and only rise to 2° C for a couple of hours before falling back to 0° C. It will be the start of several days of very cold temperatures.

    I did a couple of important-ish things yesterday, and while that was good, it was still not a great day. On the other hand, the day ended well....except it did get a bit tedious. I will explain all these things further down the page, and there is a slight chance they may make sense when I do (but I doubt it).

  My morning was the usual - spend a couple if hours writing once I had done things like checked my blood glucose, had some breakfast, and took screenshots of the weather forecast. I then had a lie down to let my wrist, elbow and eyes recover. I might even have snoozed for 5 minutes. Finally I got up, had a shower, and then got dressed to go out shopping. Yesterday it was shopping in Poundstrecher which I had been meaning to do for almost a week.

  The most important things I wanted from Poundstretcher was a couple more 10 packs of 330ml cans of Lime Diet Coke. I noted the shelf had been filled up again since I was last there, and so there was no panic about it, but one day the last box will go, never to return. The other thing I definitely wanted was two more packets of the bitter orange chocolate biscuits I tried after my last shopping trip to Poundstretcher.

  The thing about those chocolate biscuits is they seemed to have no obvious effect on my blood glucose level (the next morning). On that basis I also bought two more from the same series. One was white chocolate, and the other had hazlenut in it. When I got home I dared to look at the sugar content. I was initially shocked at how high it was, although my theory about the bitter orange biscuits was correct, and they had less huge amounts in them.

  I had to do a double take to realise they were quoting for 100gm, but each biscuit, of which there are only three in the big packet, is only 20gm. Dividing the large figure per 100gm by 5 to get the amount of sugar per 20gm biscuit makes them seem not bad, but I am rather glad there are only 3 biscuits per pack. They are very, very tasty, and it would be easy to get carried away. I managed to limit myself yesterday to one each of the two new flavours to try.

  There were other "naughty" things I bought from Poundstretcher. They were a 6 pack of very slightly stale pickled onion flavour crisps, and 10 pack of small, 24gm, bags of assorted flavour "Hula Hoops". Two each of those, plus two of the chocolate biscuits formed my very unhealthy lunch yesterday.

  The other big-ish diversion yesterday was to do some laundry. It was only two t-shirts, and maybe 5 pairs of underpants, but for some reason I took a break halfway through do it. I can't remember feeling tired, or that anything was aching. I think I was feeling bored doing it. Of course the silly thing is I had nothing better to do, and I was more bored when I took the break.

  One other thing I did once I had the laundry hanging up to dry in the dining room, with a fan heater on low blowing at it, was to spend a bit of time in the kitchen. Once I had done a small bit of washing up I then finished preparing, and then cooking my dinner. I had actually started cooking that dinner the previous day, but didn't eat it then. The chicken was cooked, but I added a lot of cauliflower before zapping it in the microwave for 15 minutes.

  It was lucky I added quite a lot of cauliflower because as I found the day before, three boneless and skinless chicken thighs, can shrink a lot when cooked. I ate dinner at about 6.30pm last night, and I think I was watching something musical on Sky Arts....It was Fleetwood Mac doing a gig in Boston (America). It should or could have been compulsive viewing, but I got side tracked.

  The Freeview channel "Great TV" were showing 5 episodes of Emma Peel era The Avengers last night. I got hooked on watching those. It is amazing how crap they should be with their simple and unbelievable plot, but somehow they do keep your attention.  One curious thing is that Emma Peel (played by Diana Rigg) should be very sexy, and indeed has her moments, but I guess she is not really my type. It is odd how most of the boxes can be ticked, but some unknown thing spoils it.

  It was after 10pm when I went to bed. I had fears I might not sleep easy last night. My dinner had given me some slight heartburn, and I read for a good half hour waiting for a couple of antacid tablets to work before turning out the light. It felt like a long time before I finally fell asleep, but I think it might have only been 10 to 15 minutes in reality. After that I don't recall losing any sleep in the night except for maybe another 15 minutes around 3am when I woke up feeling cold, and turned the heater up full before going for a pee.

  This morning I do remember some of a rambling dream. It seemed to be set in a sort of media organisation. I have no idea what my role may have been, if indeed I even had a role in the organisation. A lot of the time it was like looking over the shoulder of others working. One such person was a multi skilled TV news reader. After reading the news she had a machine generated transcript of what she had said, and had to type it in to a website.

  Quite why she needed a machine generated transcript of what she had said when she had read it all from a typed script, is one of those mysteries of the dream world.  When it came to typing it in to a web page she ran into the difficulty of running out of space. It seems they were doing what I was doing on this web site until I decided to link each date in a monthly calendar to an archive paged of the original new daily page. In her scheme, and my old scheme, it ended up with the latest stuff right at the bottom of a long page.

  I got up earlier than usual, but I seemed to waste a lot of time before I started to write this morning. One delay is my regular check on my blood glucose. It was not a great set of readings, although they range from very good to "ordinary" good, and that is the problem. It would give me more confidence if all three readings were a much closer to each other. It does happen now and then, but I have no idea why it doesn't always happen.

  This morning the Contour meter gave a very good reading of 6.9mmol/l. It was only recently that I stared getting readings starting with a 6 after a many years, and so that was a magnificent reading. The GlucoRX meter read 7.7mmol/l - almost a full unit digit more than the Contour meter. That didn't seen right, but it did almost agree with the Vivachek meter that read 8.0mmol/l. On my first attempt it read 8.1mmol/l, but I have a lot of spare test strips for that meter, and did the test again with fresh blood, and it then dropped to 8.0mmol/l. There was a long period when I struggled to get readings as low as 8.5mmol/l, and so 8.0mmol/l must be considered as good.

  My diet today could be very similar to yesterday, although I did have small portions of instant noodles for breakfast. However I can imagine not being able to improve on these figures. I am really aiming to get one blood glucose reading as low as 5.9mmol/l one day, but it would probably mean fasting for a full day, or doing a hell of a lot of exercise. There is one very unlikely chance I could improve a bit on today's readings.

  I am contemplating going to an afternoon matinee gig today. The Konks, a Kinks tribute band, who also play other 60s music, are playing in The Shortlands Tavern from 4pm this afternoon. I would be leaving home in daylight, and travelling in daylight to get to the gig, and it would be a 9 minute train journey - far better than a long ride on a slow, draughty bus ! It should be a dry afternoon out, but it is still going to be very cold. I think I will get myself ready to go out, but decide one way or another at the appropriate time.