No matter how many times I check for a revised forecast, from either The BBC or The Met Office, it seems very certain that today will be dull and gloomy, and with a maximum temperature of just 9° C it is going to feel very cool outdoors.  Tomorrow could be brighter, at least at times, but it seems unlikely there will be a single glimpse of the sun. It might be a whole degree warmer than today, but that will happen mostly late at night when there might also be a shower or two.

    Yesterday got off to a depressing start, and much of the day seemed rather less than scintillating !  On the other hand, I did achieve two useful little jobs, and so the day was not totally wasted. The depressing aspect of the day probably spilled over to my choice of lunch...of which more later.

  The really depressing thing was  after waiting weeks for my new leather jacket to be delivered all the way from China, it turned out to be the wrong size ! I ordered a 5XL size confident that it should easily be big enough. What was delivered was, at best, an XL size, and it was way too small. Not only that, but it didn't have the zipped pockets shown in the picture of the page I ordered it from.

  Upon checking my original order I confirmed the size ordered, and the style of the jacket, with it's zipped pockets. I then clicked on it as if to order it again, and the picture confirmed it should have two zipped side pockets and a zipped breast pocket. It also showed it for almost double the price ! I feel I have been fobbed off with a cheap reject that was rejected because the pockets hadn't been put in, and the size was wrong.

  Wasting money on it is depressing, but going through all the hoops to return it is also depressing - particularly having to print out a return label (assuming I can even get my printer to print without putting in new ink cartridges to replace ones that have been barely used, but have dried up), and then having to take it to a Post Office to get it sent back to Amazon. Ideally I want to send it back, and get it replaced with one that matches what I ordered, and at the original price ! I expect the best I can hope for is to get my money back.

  On a less depressing, and in fact uplifting note, I changed all my bed linen yesterday - clean bottom sheet, clean pillowcases, clean duvet cover, and clean towel used as a protector on the pillows. It felt sort of nice to go to bed in it all last night. I also washed the towel I had used as a pillow protector for those nights when my face can get a bit sweaty after too much chilli, alcohol, heat, or often all three.

  The towel was only a small hand towel, but it still needed a lot of washing. Sebum, the main constituent of sweat is not only oily, but also waxy. It is quite difficult wash out. When washing the towel yesterday I first washed it in bio detergent, and then gave it a rinse. I then washed it in the Surf detergent I bought from Savers some days ago. I am not sure if I like the smell of that detergent, but it did have one interesting property.

  For ages I have had to battle to rinse stuff out after washing. I had been blaming it on a change of tap water quality - maybe it was softer or something, but now I wonder if it was the Aldi own brand detergent. With towels it seemed to be a never ending process trying to rinse out the soap/detergent. The Surf detergent seemed to almost be sufficiently rinsed after three times in clean water. That is how I remember it was when I first started hand washing stuff over 10 years ago (15 years maybe). It was relief to get the rinsing water clear after 4 rinses, and to then hang the towel up to dry.

  After changing my bedding, but before I started washing the towel, I stopped for lunch. About the only modestly safe thing I had that I could eat was more rice crackers, but I was getting a bit bored with them. I decided it might be worth taking a chance on some oven cooked chips. I seemed to have got away with eating them in the past, and I thought I might do so again. Maybe I did...or maybe not (which I will expand on later). Anyway, I cooked a small plate of thick cut oven chips, and they were delicious !

  When dinner timne came around, at about 6pm last night, I had precooked a meal of diced lamb, sprouts, and to make a change I added a small sliced onion. I cooked it in the mini oven/grill, and some of the onion was crispy when it was time to eat it. I am not so sure the onion made a useful difference or not, but it was a pleasant enough meal, and one I knew to be "healthy" (by my own special standards).

  There were several gaps in my TV viewing last night. I don't force myself to watch rubbish while waiting for better stuff, and so I filled in the gaps by reading. I started off with the usual fare of Star Treks, and finished on an episode of QIXL. It was not a great episode, but it had it's moments. It finished at 10pm, and I went straight to bed, but read for maybe half an hour before falling asleep quite quickly.

  Although I can't remember any of the finer details, I do remember I had several dreams all about the same subject. They were almost repeats with slight variations, and they were inspired by the book I am reading. The book is "The Puppet Masters" by Robert A. Heinlein.  I am unsure if he was the originator of the idea, but it is an idea that has been used in many other books, and must have inspired "the brain slug" in the Futurama series.

  The book is about "special agents" battling alien creatures whose appearance is of a jelly like mass that attaches to the back of humans, and takes over control of those humans. In one of my dreams they were defeated, and fell off their human host, what bombarded with an assortment of radiation below the lethal level for humans. It included light, radio waves, and some nuclear radiation. The idea was to do it all at once because they were only resistant to one type of radiation at a time. Another dream used the idea of overloading their ability to receive and "hear" radio waves. Once again they were bombarded with hundreds of radio programmes at a time to stun them.

  As I mentioned above, it is hard to remember any more than a generalisation of the dreams, but I do know they were mixture of horror and triumph. Evidently they didn't seem to spoil my sleep. Getting up to pee a few times did seem to slightly spoil what were long periods of timeless sleep. Several times I looked at the clock, maybe waking up for a few seconds to do so, and was sort of astonished that hours just seemed to melt away with no sensation of it happening.

  That smooth sleep worked so well that when I thought I would just rest my eyes for a few seconds after waking just after 6am, I opened them again to find over an hour had passed !  I am trying hard to say whether I feel extra good, or even bad for that sleep, and i think the only answer I can come up with is that this morning I feel perfectly normal - a few bits mildly ache, I don't seem to have any more energy than usual, and my enthusiasm is typically very low. So everything is normal.

  Well nearly everything is normal, but my blood glucose is an enigma. The first reading I took was using the Contour meter, and it gave a fantastic reading of just 6.8mmol/l. I use the word fantastic in both its meanings - fantastic as in wonderful, and fantastic as in unbelievable. The next reading was from the GlucoRX meter, and that was very good, and maybe more believable. It read 7.8mmol/l. That is about the typical readings I am getting on better days now. The Sino Care meter must have a headache ! I tried it with a pin prick of blood from two different fingers, and it insisted my blood glucoe was very high at 9.2mmol/l. That is an incredible spread of readings, and it is hard to know which one comes closer to the truth.

  I wish I had used my fourth blood glucose meter, the Viva Chek, to give some sort of idea of what was most likely the closest to a true reading. Out of curiosity I just checked the glucose level with that meter, but about two hours after having breakfast. I have never seen such a high reading in my life.. I think I had better check it again in a few hours before thinking about any lunch.

  I have a few ideas of what I might do today. One thing I very much doubt I will be doing is going out under the gloomy sky sky. Yuck !!! I think I will have a shave, shampoo and shower today to save time tomorrow. Once I have finished with the bath I will wash the under sheet, and pillows cases I took off the bed yesterday. Another bit of housewor ought to be getting out the hoover. There are so many crumbs under my desk that It really should hoover those up, and ideally also do the rest of my bedroom. While I have the hoover out I could also do the upstairs landing and passages through to the bathroom.

  Another job I could do while I have the hoover out is to open up my spare fan heater to get all the fluff out before oiling the fan motor bearings. It should then run nice and quietly. I can then reinstate it in my bedroom, and put the spare back in it's box until next time.