The temperature today will be no higher than yesterday, 3° C in the early afternoon, but there will be no sunshine to make it less unpleasant. The dark clouds shown above have now been extended an hour from 3pm to 5pm. The chances of rain from those dark clouds is shown as just 10%, but if they do leak we could see snow. I seem to recall that snow was forecast for today about a week ago ! Clear skies tonight could see the temperature fall to -3° C tomorrow morning, but a sunny day should raise the temperature to +3° C for maybe a single hour.

    Yesterday was a semi good day. The brilliant sunshine raised the goodness of the day, and sort of acted as a catalyst for other more minor stuff to be good. One good thing is that staying warm, and coddling my chest on Monday meant that I only suffered the most minor of chest aches at times when it was stressed.
  The proof of the "repair" to my inflamed chest scars and stuff, was when I went to Tesco. I not only put on one of my warmest coats, but I also had to wear my sunglasses against the glare of the sun ! Even with the sunglasses the brightness of the sun still shut my eyes down enough that the other side of the road, which was in shadow, appeared so dark that I couldn't even make out where the pavement started. Of course, once in the shadow itself, my eyes quickly returned to normal.

  My shopping trip to Tesco was not because it was "essential" but because it was "very highly desirable". I wanted stuff I could do without for another day or more, but the sooner I had it the better. Plus it was also a good test to see if my chest aches had calmed down. I am happy to say they had. Maybe I got a very mild ache just starting when I arrived home laden down with shopping.

  That shopping included 4 x 2 litre bottles of Diet Coke in my rucksack with the slightly added weight of 4 small (85ml ?) bottles of hot pepper sauce. Some stuff I bought was really for the future. I noticed that the ice cream fridges had more cartons of Oppo low sugar ice cream. They were covered with frost as if dug out from the back of a freezer, and had been there since last summer. I bought two of them while they were available.

  As well as a bit of diced beef, which was for last night's dinner, I also bought some potatoes. Some were in the form of beer dripping cooked oven chips, and the others were in a pack marked "mini baked potatoes" - with olive oil and rosemary. They were less like baked potatoes and closer to roast potatoes with the skin on. The more significant thing is they were marked down to half price because they were on their sell by date.

  After getting home from Tesco I decided I would have those mini baked potatoes for my lunch. It didn't seem to be a very big container, and I thought it would be no more than a light snack. In fact it was quite a substantial lunch, and I should have saved as many as half of the pack for later use. They were nice, but not super nice, and so there was no real reason to eat the whole lot non stop - except towards the end I was getting a bit bored with them, although at that point there were only about 5 little pebble sized potatoes left.

  My afternoon could almost have been boring, but somehow laying on my bed, with warm sunshine coming through the windows, didn't seem very boring, or not at all when quietly reading, or having a snooze. Although I am sure there was one or two other things I might have done, the only one that springs to mind was going down into the freezing cold kitchen to do some washing up, and prepare my dinner for the evening.

  While in the cold kitchen, and perhaps aided by stretching out, and to one side or the other, while washing stuff up, I did feel a mild start to an ache in my chest, but it faded away very soon after getting back into the warm. My dinner, when I had it at about 6pm, was an almost rich beef stew with sprouts, onion and red and green chillies. To me it looked like it should have been nicer than it was, but I didn't really cook it enough to tenderise the beef.
  Once again the selection of Star Treks on last night were less than awe inspiring ! Just for a change, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was better than Star Trek: Entrerprise, but to be honest, neither were that good. It felt good when they finished so I could turn to the Talking Pictures Channel (I think) who were showing an episode of Thunderbirds. It was a fairly good episode as well ! I note that sometime soon they will also be showing the original 1966 Batman movie based on the TV series.

  I think it was about 9pm when I went to bed. I spent at least half an hour reading before turning out the light, and than maybe half an hour waiting to fall asleep. It is hard to say how well I slept last night. It seemed like I woke up more frequently than usual, but it wasn't to go for a pee, or at least not every time. I think that sometimes it was just to adjust the duvet or something. I know there were times when I felt marginally too cool, and marginally too warm.

  I did a lot of dreaming last night, and although I can only remember enough vague details to recount one of them, I have a strong impression that many of the dreams were of an erotic nature - which would have been great if only I could remember enough to enjoy them ! Fortunately there was the one dream that did leave a sort of flavour even if light on details - like how it started and ended.

  In that one part remembered dream I was sitting on a narrow armchair, and there was a woman sitting on my lap. We were both dressed - possibly in pyjamas. I remember the material was very soft and very thin. It allowed me to easily feel the texture of her skin, plus interesting parts of her body (which she enjoyed). Likewise, she could feel all of me. What I can't remember, or even guess at, was how in a narrow armchair, we were able to get our legs where I think we got our legs.

  Just before I got up I had another dream that was supposed to be erotic. It was actually more like something downloaded from a dodgy website. I would open one folder to find more folders inside, and they in turn would have more folders inside.  I did get as far as opening one picture, but it was a close up of a woman's face, and mostly eye brows - eyebrows that looked like there were from a Thunderbirds puppet ! That seemed a good cue to get up.

  This morning I got another set of blood glucose readings that were all rather different, and ranged from very good to merely good. The Contour meter was sort of in the middle this morning. It read 7.9mmol/l. That is good, but not that good. The GlucoRX meter gave a very nice low reading of 6.7mmol/l. The Sino Care meter read 8.1mmol/l, and while fairly good, it was not as good as the others. The odd thing is that I took a lot of care to wipe away the blood after each reading, and squeeze out a new little bead of blood every time. Sometimes that works to give three very close, or at one time, identical readings.

  The main thing on today's menu is my usual Wednesday lunchtime session in The Jolly Farmers. It is likely I'll be on my own as is usual now, but there is a chance that Michael may join me. As far as I am aware he he been almost living at the hospital as he takes care of his wife who has been having mental health problems. I'll send him a message before I head to the pub to say that if he fancies a break I'll be in the pub from about 1pm.

  After the pub I have a naughty treat in store. One other thing I bought in Tesco yesterday was a bag of frozen, beef dripping cooked, oven chips. I think a hot plate of those will go down well after being out in the cold today. Later this evening, possibly around 6pm, I will probably have roast sprouts and dice lamb....maybe flavoured with mint this time (the last time I added rosemary).