Today promises to be rather dull, and in the middle of the day it will be wet. In the latest revision to the forecast, light rain will start to fall at 2pm. By 4pm it will have turned to drizzle followed by one more hour of light rain at 5pm. The temperature will slowly rise until it reaches 12° C, but not until 9pm ! Tomorrow could reach 13° C as early as 11am. Once again there will be several hours of rain in the middle of the day, and some of it could be heavy rain.

    The sunshine made yesterday a rather nice day - providing you weren't out in the chilly air. It inspired me to do just one thing of importance yesterday - shopping. I can't really recall doing anything particularly worthwhile apart from that shopping, but even so, the day passed by fairly smoothly.

The bright sunshine made it look like it should have been warm outside, but the thermometer disagreed. I think it may have only been 7° C when I went to Tesco. I wore a warm coat, but I didn't do the front up. The sunshine on the black coat got it pretty warm inside, but my exposed fingers and ears were very cold. The picture on the left as actually taken at 2.25pm, and shows the temperature outside, 8° C, and the temperature inside my south facing front room. With no heating on in that room for a week or more, the sun coming through the windows raised the temperature to an almost comfortable 20.5° C !

  I almost wonder if 7° C could be the trigger point when cold air really gets my chest aching when breathing it in. On my walk to and from Tesco my chest didn't ache as expected, but I became lightly wheezy. That was no actual problem, but it was still a bit annoying. Much of what I bought in Tesco was fairly light, and so I had an easy walk home. The heaviest things were two 2l bottles of water, and a bottle of Jameson's whiskey (reduced to £20 with a Club Card).

  A couple of other slightly heavy items were a can of Danish ham (possibly Danish style ham), and a small can of chopped ham and pork (because Tesco can't use the word Spam to describe it). Both these things will be used in salad sometime in the near future. I also bought a lot of salad ingredients as well as some meat that might possibly end up in a salad (the chicken almost certainly, but I have doubts about the diced beer).

  There was one item that probably wasn't a good idea, but the nutritional information on the wrapping declared it to have a very low sugar content. It was a small pork pie. I scoffed the whole thing, with some added English mustard. It was nice enough, but it seemed lacking in the flavour department. I suspect that the salt content has been reduced to comply with health guidelines, and regulations no longer allow some of the more dubious, but maybe more tastier bits of meat.

  Instead of doing anything healthy, like going for a walk (which may not actually have been healthy in the cold air), I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon just laying on my bed, in the sunshine that was streaming through the windows, and feeling really good.....well good in respect to the bright sunshine and warmth, but maybe not in other ways. I knew I was wasting time, but another alternative would have been to do some gardening, and that could have resulted in a wheezy breath (from the chilly air), an aching back and other bits.

  One thing I didn't do was to spend some time in the cold kitchen preparing a heap of salad to have with, possibly, Tesco's own version of Spam cut into cubes.  One reason for not preparing any food during the afternoon, was that I had a nagging feeling about something in the fridge. When I later checked I found a packet of Aldi sausages that were well past their use by date.

  When I opened the packet it still smelled OK, and later on those sausages tasted fine. If anything they tasted better than expected. I did have a mad idea that I would cook them, and then allow them to cool down before slicing them into chunks that I could add to a salad. it possibly would have worked, but I left it all a bit late, and ate them still very warm (but not hot) with a couple of sliced tomatoes. The tomatoes were "classic round tomatoes". In other words, force grown and ripened to give little flavour, and, at least in my wild theory, low in sugar (some tomatoes are packed with sugar).

  Last night was an extremely poor night for TV. All the Star Trek episodes shown last night were quite tedious. The Original series episode was yet another that seemed to be a repeat from a few weeks ago. Deep Space Nine was another terribly boring episode about those bloody Bajoran prophets, and Enterprise was part three of a really tedious story. I chose to watch one of my recordings, and it was the same episode of The Avengers that was showing sometime in the evening.

  I went back to reading after The Avengers episode was finished, but at 9pm I turned on the TV to watch Have I Got News For You - which turned out to be an edition I last watched a few weeks ago. I turned off again, and went to bed. I read in bed for maybe another half hour before trying for sleep.  As far as I can recall, sleep seemed to come quickly and easy. It was the same thing quite a few times in the night.

  I think I was possible waking up every two hours. Sometimes it was to turn the heater up or down, and most time it was for a pee. The fact that I was peeing so much didn't bode well for my blood glucose readings later.  I feel sure I had many dreams, but only a bit of one dream sticks in my memory because it was quite erotic, but to my great annoyance there seemed to be no follow up to that 90 seconds of "interesting activity" with a girl from my past !

  Once I got up I found that not only were my blood glucose measurements bad, but they were more terrible than I could have imagined. It was like the grilled sausages had loads of sugar in them. Maybe that is why they tasted so good, but maybe the two tomatoes didn't help. I can't think of anything else I ate that could account for a terrible 9.7mmol/l on the Contour meter. The Sino Care meter agreed with that exactly. Only the GlucoRX meter gave a sane reading of 8.7mmol/l. I did try the Contour meter a second time, and I think it was better but still awful with a reading of 9.3mmol/l.

  I guess top of my agenda today is to fast again until dinner time tonight. I think tonight will be the experimental Spam salad. The only definite thing today will be my latest beer order being delivered, allegedly, between 11am and midday.  With the afternoon being even gloomier than it is now, and with the promised rain, whether drizzle or heavy, I think I can imagine a very lazy afternoon !