Both forecasters are adamant that today will be a rather dull day, but that the temperature should reach 13° C. At the moment it is both looking grim, and sort of fairly light. The chances of the cloud breaking up seems slimmer today. On the other hand, the latest revision to the forecast has shuffled around some of the dark grey, and light grey clouds. That suggests things are not completely static, and so change can be expected - hopefully for the better.  Tomorrow may be a clone of today.

    I felt worse than I thought I felt yesterday morning, and even a bit into the afternoon. I was OK sitting here quietly behind my keyboard typing yesterday's blog entry, but after that I found myself disinclined to do anything except quietly read. That was OK because I predicted that as I finished writing yesterday.

  I wasn't completely idle yesterday. It took a lot of willpower to start, and a bit to keep going, but I did some laundry early yesterday afternoon. All it was, was a hand towel only used in the kitchen, and 5 bar towels. All had been soaked in beer when we had an accident on Thursday. Upon opening one of the beer fridges a bottle of quite expensive beer fell out. It didn't drop far, and landed on a rug on a carpet, but somehow the bottom of the bottle came off, and it was a semi clean break.

  It was a very dark beer, and very aromatic. A few days later and there is still a sort of brewery smell in the dining room. The hand towel, which I had already replaced so I could wash it some time, soaked up much of the beer, and the bar towels helped mop up the rest of it. I wasn't terribly keen to wash all that stuff yesterday, but I know if it was left it would attract beer flies, and start to get stink, and so it had to be washed.

  As soon as I plunged the towel into the detergent it turned brown ! Even the first rinse water had a hint of brown. Fortunately it was a fairly thin towel, and of course each bar towel is fairly small (about 14 x 7 inches). It made the wringing out, the hardest part of hand laundry, modestly easy. I did the whole lot in one go, and hung it all on the small clothes horse in the dining room. I gave it several hours of the fan heater on low blowing on it. Later on I changed to using a desk fan which I left running overnight. This morning it was all dry.

  The only other thing I did which while it didn't take a lot of physical effort, did require a bit of time. It was to construct a Greek inspired salad for my dinner. I washed and cut up spring onions, a single green chilli, 5 small pre-cooked and cooled baby potatoes, a couple of small sticks of celery, about 5 baby tomatoes, wild rocket and some coriander. I then added some ready prepared olives (green and black), sprinkled on some salt, some virgin olive oil, and finally squeezed some lemon juice on it all.
  I covered the bowl with clingfilm because it was far too early for dinner, plus it wasn't a lot earlier that I had had some lunch. Lunch was an unusual combination of two things that probably had a modestly high sugar content. The "main course" was a pack of ready to eat BBQ flavour sliced chicken breast. I accompanied it with over half a big bag of parsnip based crisps flavoured with chilli and maple. They were rather nice, but I could taste what I suspect was artificial maple syrup flavouring far more than any hint of chilli.

  Later on, after doing some quiet reading, I watched some old bullshit about aliens on the Blaze channel because the episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, seemed like it was a repeat from as little as a fortnight ago (I seems like they are showing one season of Star Trek: TOS over and over again). After that, or at 6pm, I watched an episode of Star Tek: Enterprise. It was a fairly good episode, but had a silly ending as a taster of a couple of rather silly (silly as in stupid) episodes that I may skip over.

   At the start of the Star Trek: Enterprise I had my special, Greek inspired salad. I had it with nothing else. I think some sliced hard boiled eggs may have been traditionally added to it. I thought maybe some corned beef would have gone well with it. Angela suggested ham - yes Angela ! I posted the picture of the salad on a well known social media website, and Angela, who hasn't really acknowledge my existence for ages now, actually "liked" it, and also added that she hoped I had used good quality extra virgin olive oil on it, and the suggestion that ham would go with a future version of it.

  I did have a sort of dessert after the salad. It was the last 5 sugar free chocolate chip cookies I found in the small supermarket on Catford Bridge. I still can't remember if it was no added sugar, or no sugar at all. I think some artifical sweetener is used in them, and I have no idea if the "no sugar" only refers to the cookie dough, or if it includes the chocolate chips as well. They are moderately nice, and that is a good enough reason to buy another packet when I go to that supermarket again, but it would also be good to study the ingredients and sugar free claims properly.

  Just one edition of QI seemed good enough last night. I could have watched another, and then gone on to watch Have I Got News For You, but I thought that 9pm was late enough for last night, and soon after I was in bed reading for a while. I might have read for the next hour, but the end of a chapter seemed a good point to put the book down, and turn out the light. I have no recollection of having any difficulties getting to sleep, and maybe I was fast asleep before 10pm.

  When I woke up I could have sworn the clock said it was just after 6am. I didn't have time to check because I needed a pee. When I got back from the toilet I was both relieved and yet disappointed when I saw it was really about 1.20am. I got back into bed, and expected it to take a long time before I got back to sleep. The next thing I knew was that it was about 4am. I can't remember the exact time despite studying the clock most carefully to make sure I had not mistaken the time again.

  Once again I seemed to fall asleep really easily again. I slept through to about 6.20am before getting up. At some time, I think in the last hour or so of sleep, I had a dream that I sort of remember enough to give a brief description of a some things I saw, but not enough to fully describe what was going on. Essentially the dream was about a radio station called Radio Bramley, which is somewhere generically "up north". Somehow they had been award an FM broadcast licence, and three medium wave licenses to allow them to cover a bigger area.

   One very peculiar thing was that I was picking them up on a TV - with pictures. The signal was weak, but it was travelling quite a distance to get to me. I seem to think the core of the dream was about the stations music policy. They had promised to play good music, but were playing trash because it was more commercial. That is the sad story about most on the "new" radio stations when licences were finally issued 20 or more years ago. With one or two exceptions, all those new stations were bought up by media companies who only cater for the most basic tastes.

  I was hoping my blood glucose readings would be a little better than they were this morning. On the other hand, I did know that some of what I ate was not good, and maybe it was the addition of lots of small bad things added up to spoil my glucose readings. The very best was the Contour meter. That read 8.9mmol/l. That is OK-ish, but lower would be more satisfactory. Oddly enough the Sino Care meter closely agreed with that with a reading of 9.0mmol/l. It is only very slightly higher, but it crossed the threshold into the nines. I much, much prefer to get readings under that (and sevens are what I really want). The GlucoRX meter really put the boot in with a reading of 9.5mmol/l. Oh well, at least it is under the red line at 10.0mmol/l.

  Today is another day when the grey skies do not tempt me out, and I suspect I will stay in all day. I have a few t-shirts and some underwear to wash, and I expect I'll do that, although there is no urgency for it. The real difficult questions are what to do about food. I have plenty to make another salad or two, but I also have a lot of meat that will have to be used up in the not too distant future. Some of that meat is a couple of skinless/boneless chicken breasts. It suddenly occurs to me that I could dice them up, grill them, and have those in a Mediterranean inspired salad. Preparing all that will suck up a bit of time today. After that I have plenty of reading to do. I don't think I have explicitly mentioned it, but I am currently re-reading my entire collection of Robert A. Heinlein books. They should keep me occupied for ages !