This morning the sky is more white than blue, and yet the sun is shining. I will admit that as I write this it is rather watery sunshine. The Met Office forecast, as shown above, is a bit dismal, and it is probably better to put our faith in the BC forecast. It shows sunny spells almost all day long, and the only time it doesn't is when it shows full strength sunshine for 6pm. Like the Met Office forecast it does agree that this afternoon's temperature will reach 14° C. Tomorrow will probably see a return to cloudy skies, and rain in the evening. Only 12° C can be expected - not as warm as today, but better than some recent days.

   Yesterday sort of OK. As expected I did a lot of resting to make up for a bad night's sleep, but I did also do some useful stuff. The best thing was no angina pains, although I did seem to feel a bit fragile in that area. Another good thing is that I seemed to get my blood glucose level under control.

  The worst thing about yesterday morning was my very high blood glucose readings. It was inevitable after eating far too much for dinner the previous night. I channelled that disappointment into fasting in the morning. In some ways, breakfast has become one of the highlights of my day, and not having any stressed my resolve,but I came through it OK. One special reason for breakfast is that id nothing else, it is a good way of stopping my cod liver oil capsule from repeating all morning, with it's nasty strong fishy taste.

  Apart from writing yesterday's diary/blog, I spent almost the rest of the morning laying on my bed reading, and also snoozing. I think I managed quite a long snooze, or at least it felt like I had snoozed for a long time, but without noting the start and finish time there is no way to tell if it was 2 minutes, or more than an hour. Despite all that inactivity, if you count reading as doing nothing because the most expenditure of energy is just holding the book up, my digestive system carried on digesting the last of my huge dinner.

  At midday I rechecked my blood glucose readings, and found a huge improvement, I actually made a note of the figures this time. The Contour meter read 7.8mmol/l - quite a drop from 9.1mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter read 8.2mmol/l, and although not a big decrease, it was still a good reading. The Sinocare meter read 8.7mmol/l. That was a tiny bit hight, but a huge improvement on 10.0mmol/l.

  Those much lower readings suggested it would be safe to have some lunch. My lunch was to be one of the two shish kebabs left from my takeaway order the previous night. The salad was looking a bit limp, and of course it was completely cold, but it was still very enjoyable - maybe more so after missing out on breakfast. One of the things it did, although not straight away , was to perk me up a bit.

  After half an hour, or maybe a bit longer, of laying on my bed reading, and trying to snooze, I though it was time to do something useful, where in this case "useful" included some light stress testing of my body. I decided I would hand wash (that being my only way of doing any laundry) a few items of of clothing. It was no more than two t-shirts and 3 or 4 pairs of underpants. It seemed painless, and nearly, but not, effortless. It felt quite pleasing to do something on a day when I didn't know if I were capable of it.

   I did one other little bit of work yesterday afternoon. It was to do all the washing up. There was not a lot of things to wash, but it included all the beer glasses from Thursday afternoon's beer tasting. There was not a lot to do except read after that, but dinner time seemed to be approaching fairly fast, and I wondered if it would be safe to eat the second shish kebab. I was hoping it would be for two reasons. The first was obviously because I would enjoy eating it, and the other reason was that I doubted it would be edible if left for another day.

  At 6pm I checked my blood glucose readings again. The Contour meter read 8.2mmol/l. and that was a little higher than at midday, but still a low figure. The GlucoRX meter read lower than it did at midday with a reading of 7.5mmol/l. The Sinocare meter read 8.0mmol/l on the second reading. The first was up in the nines, and so different to the other two that I did it again. One thing of maybe more interest was the average of the three readings. At midday the average was 8.2mmol/l, and that was pretty good. The average of the three at 6pm was 7.9mmol/l, and that is even better.

  That seemed to be the green light to eat that second shish kebab. Once again I ate it cold, and maybe it was not quite a good as the chicken shish I had at lunchtime. That second shish was a lamb shish, and lamb is not so good to eat cold. I though it would be safe to have a dessert of sugar free biscuits. They should have been safe, but this morning it suggested not.

  For the first time in several or more days, I watched some live TV last night. It was just one, one hour (including adverts) programme from the series of "Secrets Of The London Underground". I am unsure why, but it didn't seem as good as some form the series. It finished at 9pm, and I went straight to bed afterwards. I thought that after all my resting, including one or more snoozes, I might not be that sleepy, and I would be able to finish the short story I was reading. After about 10 minutes of reading I felt sleepy. I put the book down, turned out the light, and maybe 10 minutes later, Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

  I seemed to barely make more than 2 hours of sleep without waking up, usually for a pee, through the night, but there was one occasion when I decided I didn't really need a pee, and went back to sleep again. I only remember one dream (or a few shorter dreams remembered as one), and it was a most frustrating dream. It was initially set in a sort of workplace where there were 4 people. One was presumably the boss, and he asked me and one other (who I think was Jodie) to catch a bus taking one route, to meet with a third person whose name I think was Alan (but not Jodie's boyfriend), taking a different route.

  We seemed to have started in Forest Hill. Me and Jodie got a bus that seemed to be a 160, but was actually following the 185 route. Alan was to get the 122 bus. Both bus routes met again at Ladywell. From there the plan was to get another bus to Alan's house, somewhere in Eltham, to get a piece of equipment. The short ending to the dream(s) was that we never did meet up, and the longer version had me and Jodie partly waiting in a pub. One curiosity is that we seemed to have mobile phones, but no one had anyone else's number, and so we could not contact each other.

  I felt vaguely OK when I got up, and my temperature, and even (although a bit later) my blood pressure readings were very good, my blood glucose readings were a disappointment. The Contour meter read rather high until I did it again, and hen it read a good 8.2mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter read an even slightly better 8.1mmol/l. The Sinocare meter, even after two attempts, insisted my blood glucose level was 9.3mmol/l. At least that is below the red line, but it still spoils things a lot.

  I had hoped that at least one reading was in the sevens. It is seeming like the magic is over. I wonder if I should blame the sugar free biscuits that I had for dessert last night. The "sugar free" chocolate chip cookies do actually contain 0.2gms of sugar, but I think that is per 100gm, and each cookie, of which I had four, should be considerably less. The sugar free vanilla wafers have seemed in the past to really be zero sugar, but something messed up my readings this morning, and I don't know what to blame.

  Oh well, the average of all three readings came out to be 8.53mmol/l, and that is very average. It seemed good enough to have breakfast this morning. I had two small packets of tomato flavour instant noodles. There are three different makes of tomato flavour noodles usually stocked in the little supermarket on Catford Bridge. I have yet to decide which is the nicest. Somehow it always seems to be one of the two I am not eating that is best. Maybe they are all mediocre, and I just can't bring myself to believe it.

  In an ideal world I would skip lunch today, and maybe I will, but there are complications. One thing I want to do today is to go out and get a bit of shopping. I am getting very low on a few things, including my favourite toothpaste. As well as stretching my legs, it is also a test to see if I get any angina pains during a (hopefully) brisk walk. The downside is that if, as I intend, I include Poundstretcher in my shopping walk, it may well involve buying edibles. If, for instance, they have yet another new flavour/make of instant noodles, I will have to buy some, and will want to test them - probably for lunch.

  If my walk is favourable, and it could be with the sunshine, and apparently a very mild breeze, I could be tempted to try and go out tonight, although the gig I was contemplating for this weekend was actually last night...... Having just looked at a list of gigs there are a couple of bands I might have considered if they weren't playing where they are playing. It looks like I will be staying in again tonight. Perhaps it will seem very different after tonight when the clocks change to make the evenings lighter.
      







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