The latest revisions of the weather forecast now more closely reflect the reality of full sunshine, and that latest revision says it should last until midday. After that the Met Office only shows a handful of sunny spells, but The BBC says there should be sunny spells until sunset - except at 5pm when they predict a thunderstorm. With the temperature rising to 25° C today, there could be enough energy injected into the atmosphere to trigger a thunderstorm, but I think the BBC are just trying to be dramatic. Tomorrow will be cooler than today. Just 20° C, and there could be few sunny spells (Met Office) or lots of sunny spells (BBC), but no full sunshine.
 
   Yesterday was both a lazy and very busy day. As predicted, in the last paragraph I wrote yesterday, I did mostly make the day up as I went along, although my prediction that I might do some laundry turned out to be right. I can count the main things I ended up doing on the fingers (ignoring the thumb) of one hand, and still have a finger left over !

  Until midday I was mostly lazy, although I did wash a few things up in the kitchen. It wasn't until I had had a shower, just after midday, that I decided I would start on what was quite a big job. It started innocently enough with just plunging some clothes into detergent, and leaving them to soak for an hour. That was nearly my downfall. It would have been so easy just to leave that big builders bucket of clothes to soak all afternoon, and through the night.

  Fortunately I realised that would be stupid, pulled my long cuff rubber gloves on, and got washing. I knew I would be drying the clothes on the washing line, and so wasn't constrained by how much I could hang on the clothes horse allowing free circulation of air. Three rinses, and a dunking it fabric conditioner later, I was hanging those clothes on the washing line. The tally was three t-shirts, a pair of lounge pants, and 5 pairs of underpants.

  It took quite a lot of effort to get that lot ready to hang on the line. Each item needs to be wrung out, purely by hand, five times before it can be hung out to dry. In fact you could say six times because I gave each item one more wringing out just before I hung it on the line.

  Hanging it all on the line brought another reward beyond finishing the job, and able to take a rest. As I was hanging the stuff on the line I was surrounded by a continuous drone of tens of bees going about their business. I no longer even have a lawn, let alone a manicured lawn, and do not have carefully placed ranks of pretty flower, but I do have loads of "meadow flowers", and the bees love them. There were about three different species dodging from flower to flower, and they were very well behaved as I waded through the flowers, and didn't get aggressive if I brushed passed them.

  Once the laundry was all done I treated myself to a nice lie down, and read some more pages from my current book, Robert A. Heinlien's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress". I could probably have read, and occasionally dozed off, for several or more hours. There was fairly bright sunshine coming through the windows, and although not very hot sunshine, it did have a very lazy, relaxing feel to it, but after maybe an hour I decided I wanted to do something else very useful.

  That useful thing was something I had been waiting on some warm sunny days to do, and it was to change all my bed sheets, pillow cases and duvet cover. The pillow cases and the fitted sheet I can dry indoors, but the duvet cover is far more easily dried on the washing line in warm sunshine. The long range forecast suggests it could be a wait of a fortnight or more for some more good drying days, but there is no great rush.

  There was just one more thing of note that I did and it was to prepare and cook my dinner. During the day I definitely needed some munchies after all the hard work I did, but I kept those munchies to a safe minimum. My dinner was, I hoped, a very safe dinner, and maybe it actually was. It was an ersatz special kebab of mini oven/grill roasted/grilled diced chicken with onion, a green bell pepper, and some baby tomatoes, plus a single, rather limp, chilli pepper.
  It was quite a tasty dinner, but it was a bit underdone - as in it was all cooked, but not overcooked enough to char the edges of some stuff for extra flavour. There were a lot more baby tomatoes in it than are apparent in the photo. I used up the last of a bag of tomatoes, and I was a bit worried I had over done it because those little tomatoes are quite sweet, but I mostly got away with it. I followed it with 4 "no added sugar" (which is not to be confused with "sugar free")  yoghurt cereal bars.

  Saturday night is when Great TV! show their back to back episodes of The Avengers - five episodes, each shown one at a time on Monday to Friday. That could mean that I would have seen each episode no more than 5 days ago, but I have often been in bed before their weekday showing at 9pm. Most were very familiar from as little as several months ago. One was an episode I didn't really like, but one was worth watching because I was not familiar with it at all.

  Once again I was in bed around 9pm, and it was nice to get on all that fresh bed linen. My "special shish kebab" was not spicy, and that was probably good because it did cause some very mild heartburn. This time some Bicarbonate Of Soda in water did seem to relieve it, and some time after 10pm I got to sleep without much trouble. Like the previous night, I seemed to feel comfortable when going to sleep, but an hour later I woke up feeling cool.

  I could have pulled the duvet over me, and probably should have done so, but I turned the heater on low. There was a particular reason I didn't use the duvet to keep warm last night. It was because when I woke up I found my pillow was wet with sweat. When I said my dinner was not spicy, I meant I didn't add any chilli sauce, but there was one diced chilli in it, and I did sprinkle a fair bit of black pepper on it. I don't really recall that black pepper influencing the taste much, but it was either those things, or something mysterious causing my night sweats.

  There are two bits of dreams I remember from last night. One was about shopping in a supermarket. It was a bot like being set in a simple cartoon - only the relevant bits of the supermarket were drawn in. In this case most of it was a single checkout with a queue of about 5 people waiting to be served. It all seems a bit hazy now, but I think we were waiting for a faulty computer to reboot, and hopefully work before the checkout could be used.

  The other dreams were actually a series of dreams that followed on from each other apparently seamlessly. It seemed to start with being on a bus without any particular destination. The bus was very strange with seating around small square tables. Initially I was with my friend Patricia, but she was spending all the journey doing work on her laptop.  In the next segment she was on a table a bit further down the bus, and I think it was my older sister sat with me at my table.

  At this point I realised the bus was going to Crystal Palace, and I remarked to my sister, who was now my younger sister, that she had never seen the dinosaurs as Crystal Palace, and that she would enjoy seeing them. By the time we got to Crystal Palace my younger sister had changed into Jodie, who also would enjoy seeing the dinosaurs. As we approached I saw that Crystal Palace had been very much re-developed. The bus suddenly turned left, did a sort of loop, and entered the bus station form the opposite end.

  We got off the bus and had to walk between many temporary looking buildings that were a museum and educational centres. They were doing a hard sell on certain books - even to the extent that the steps of some stairs were made from books, or looked like books. The last bit of the dream was walking through a cafeteria where I saw Patricia still working on her laptop at a table.

  I woke up at just gone 6am with cramp in both legs. I did my best to leap out of bed to get some weight on my legs, but with both legs cramping I could hardly stand up. Once I finally got weight on my legs I was OK, and went for a small pee. I could have stayed up then, but with today being a Sunday I went back to bed, and managed to sleep for maybe half the hour I laid in bed. One leg was cramping again when I got up, but one leg meant I could stand on the other first before I put my weight on the other leg.

  This morning my blood glucose readings were very nice in terms of a mathematical progression. I got 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3mmol/l. Sadly none were in the sevens, but these low eights were good enough to not have to worry too much - except my aim is get more readings in the sevens now. What was good was that I seemed to have thrown off the highest peaks of my weight recently. This morning I was about 2kg lighter than the highest peak in the last month or less.

  Doing yesterday's laundry, plus changing my bed linen, has left me with a few aches and pains this morning. I doubt I will do any more laundry today, although I might still have been tempted to wash the sheet and pillowcases if I thought it wouldn't attract the BBC's thunderstorm while it was drying on the line.  What I hope I will do is to go to Savers and, among other random things, get some new detergent, and maybe a new fabric conditioner (just small bottles of each).

  This afternoon should be a beer tastings session with Jodie. There was a small possibility of going to an afternoon gig in Beckenham Place Park, but there are no Thameslink train today because of engineering work. I could get the 54 bus, or I could not be bothered to do so. I chose the latter, plus I know Jodie wants to fondle the new beers that were delivered on Friday. All I have to do now is to try and stay sober enough to eat sensibly tonight !
        







1949 words today