Today started off cold and wet. The forecast said just 6° C, but I think it might have been closer to 5° C. I think the rain has stopped now, but the road outside looks very wet. Most of today will be either mid grey, or dark grey. When it is dark grey, like from 5pm onwards, there could be a lot of rain, and much of it could be heavy rain. The BBC has the rain falling from as early as 2pm, but the heavy rain may not start until 7pm. The afternoon may reach 12° C, or possibly 13° C if the BBC forecast turns out to be closer to reality. Tomorrow sees the oddity of the lowest temperature in the middle of the day. It could be just 8° C, and although no heavy rain is forecast, a lot of light rain could fall.

   I thought I could describe yesterday as a moderately good day, but with hindsight it was actually a rather poor day. I had very loose thought that I might go out last night, and so I decided I would have a shower later in the day, a few hours before going out, but I didn't go out, and another day went by when I didn't wash at all.

  I guess I average about 3 days a week when I don't bother to shower in the morning, and those days are when I am convinced I won't be going out anywhere, and when I am convinced I will get no visitors. Oh well, it save a bit of gas (for heating the water for a shower), and it reduced my metered water charge. For that matter it saves on shower gel, and makes my bath towel last an extra day. On the whole it is a very positive thing, and yet there is always the fear that I might get a visitor !

  Yesterday I noted that my blood glucose readings were high enough to need special action, and so while I had a breakfast, and it used two small packets of instant noodles, and so not that little, I intended to eat very sparsely during the day. I intended to skip lunch, and any snacks, and see how my blood glucose was looking nearer dinnertime. Well, that was the plan, and I half carried it out.

  I tried to keep myself distracted for as much of the time that I could so I would not think of food. In the morning that meant mostly quietly reading and resting after writing 2.268 words in yesterday's electronic diary. I think electronic diary describes this "blog", or just plain diary, much better. I don't know why I didn't think of "electronic diary" many years ago. I have now decided to change a few things to reflect this now idea.

  It got to lunchtime and I part gave in, and had a small amount of salted peanuts to chew on before starting a small project I mentioned yesterday. I have had two NAS (Network Attached Storage) units just gathering dust for ages. I originally bought them out of curiosity, and a possible need. They were relatively cheap, but you had to put in your own hard disk. In the days when computer hard disks were often no more than 160GB, and often even smaller, being able to shift some stuff off the hard disk was a handy idea, but it became sort of redundant when very large hard disks became a lot cheaper.

  For instance my main PC has two hard disks in it. There is a 128GB SSD hard disk for the operating system, and a 2GB disk for all my personal data. I decided to resurrect one of those NAS boxes to use as a more convenient way to transfer stuff between my main PC and the PC on the dining room table. In an ideal world I would go through all the rigmarole to transfer data direct from my main PC to the dining room PC, but I've been lazy, and sort of unwilling to learn the bits needed for file sharing. I really ought to because once set up it would be so convenient.

  The NAS box I intended to use had a 500GB hard disk, and it only had some files on it that were backups of data that is now saved onto two USB external hard drives. I formatted the hard disk, and reset all the passwords and stuff to new ones. From then on I could use the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to transfer files to and from it. In theory I could set it for Windows networking, but I have a feeling the version of Samba on it is no longer supported. Getting that working would simplify things too, but maybe not when two Linux PCs are involved.

  What took a lot longer, and I never did get it to work, was sharing my calendar data from my main (or "master") PC to the dining room PC. I spent a lot of time in the unheated dining room because I thought it should be an easy job. It was not ! I had to look up where the Calendar data file was in my home directory. I couldn't find it at first because I had forgotten the stand alone app I am using was once part of Evolution, and the data file is hidden under that name.

  Now all I thought I had to do was to copy that data file across to the dining room PC, install the Calendar app on it, and it all should work. It definitely did not ! I have a suspicion it is all to do with file ownership and permissions. It is something I can look into later, and if it is the case, it should be easy to fix. After spending so much time in the cold dining room I gave up and decided to warm up again. That was at about 2pm. I decided I would have what I think of as a very light lunch - two small apples, a small pear, and a chunk of cheese.
  It was just before 2.30pm when my latest Amazon order was delivered. It was, as per the picture above, three new bottles of Irish whiskey. Only the one on the right, the Jameson Crested, was probably completely new to me. I am very familiar with the other two. I did open, and try little more than s simple sip of the Crested. I didn't think it was as smooth as ordinary Jameson's, but it still seemed very drinkable. Now I have ordered these from Amazon I am fully expecting them to be on Clubcard offer from Tesco, although the Amazon price is possibly no more than a single £1 more than the Clubcard price.

  I didn't really do anything of note after the booze delivery......oh, actually I did do one more thing. I finished washing the smelly kitchen hand towel that had been soaking in bio detergent for 24 hours. It seemed to dry very quickly after I used a desk fan to blow it dry. It seemed to be stain free, and smelling nice (or as much as bio detergent can smell nice). On the subject of bio detergent, Tesco's own brand smell much nicer than Aldi's own brand.

  As time passed I realised I felt far too weary to go out in the evening, and that was a shame because there were actually three gigs I might have gone to. I just couldn't raise the enthusiasm to go out. By about 5pm I had another possible diversion in mind. I checked my blood glucose, and it seemed to be a very safe 8.5mmol/l - not exactly low, but low enough to allow me to order a kebab takeaway.

  At just before 6pm I ordered two kebabs. One was a lamb donor kebab with salad. It was from the same place as last time, and I knew that a small was actually quite a big dinner. I took a chance that a small "special chicken shish" would also be quite big. The "special" bit of it is chunks of onion, tomato and mushroom grilled at the same time as the chicken. I was sensible and only ate the donor kebab last night, but the special chicken did seem to be fairly substantial, and the good thing about the place I ordered it from puts the salad in a separate put so the non salad part can be safely reheated the next day - i.e. for dinner tonight.

  Last night was a theoretical boring night on TV. The only thing I could see to watch in the small time window of opportunity was a repeat showing of Secrets Of The London Underground. I had watched it at least once before, and I didn't see anything revelations I had nots seen the last time. It finished at 9pm, and I went straight to bed to read. I was reading until quite late because I was getting close to the end of the book, and I wanted to finish it.

  It may have been 11pm when I finished. I turned the light out, rolled over, and my chest started to hurt. I felt certain it was a sort of heartburn brought on after eating too much. The mystery meat of of the lamb donor kebab was pretty dense, but it didn't seem that I was over full by any traditional measure, but I think that was at least part of the problem. I am unsure if it actually faded out on it's own, but I took a few antacid tablets, and they did seem to work.

  It was at least midnight before I got to sleep. Apart from what I'll simply call heartburn, even if that is not strictly accurate, I was over taken by another thing that kept me awake - the temperature. I had turned the heater off before going to bed, and it was getting a little cool in my bedroom, but it seemed to be too hot under my duvet. At one point, even when I had kicked the duvet aside, I had what I can only describe as a hot flush. A lot of my skin seemed to tingle, and my brow started to lightly sweat.

  I felt forced to put the heater on, and I managed to fall asleep even while the room was not quite warm enough to be even partly uncovered. I seem to recall waking up once an hour to go for a pee, although the last one had zero urgency about it. It was after that last pee, at about 3am, when I declared to hell with the electricity bill, and turned the heater on full. I slept far better after that, and I may have even slept non stop until just gone 6am.

  I came awake really fast with that undefined feeling that says it it really is time to get up. I did a few quick things on the computer, but I needed a pee. I went to the toilet, and I am happy to say that not only did I do a big pee, but I also did a reasonable poo as well. That made a nice change. After taking screenshots of the weather forecasts, and looking at a spammy like email from Just eat, it was time to weigh myself, and check my blood glucose readings.

  Both my weight and blood glucose readings were very disappointing. It seems I have managed to keeping very slowly putting weight on, and I am now almost back up to my "official" recorded weight in my medical records. I had hoped that after the care I took, that my blood glucose would be reasonably low this morning. It wasn't ! The Contour meter read 8.8mmol/l. That was reasonable, but the other two did not match it, and both were in the pink area. The GlucoRX read 9.0mmol/l, and the Sinocare read 9.3mmol/l.

    The only consolation in all this is that the average of all three was 9.27mmol/l yesterday morning, and this morning the average has dropped a bit to 9.03mmol/l. Today I have to hope that I can be very careful with what I eat during the day, and I just hope that the "special chicken kebab" might be a bit safer than last night's donor kebab. It might be more complicated than that. A week ago I had a much bigger kebab order, and I ate it all on the night. It gave me very fierce heartburn, but the next morning all my blood glucose readings were in the green (all figures started with a 7). It could be some sign I am fighting an infection - that always raise my blood glucose readings, but I am unaware of of any obvious infection.

  Tonight I could also go to a gig, but the weather is very unfriendly for going out even to the shops today. It looks like I will be staying in all day. I wonder what I will do to pass the time ?
        







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