Yesterday was sufficiently like summer that I had several windows open all day !  Mainly sunny spells were forecast, but it seemed to feel like many more hours were non stop sunshine. It drove the afternoon temperature up beyond the forecast  22° C to possibly 24° C. Sadly, just before the day officially ended at midnight, there was some rain.
       

  I'm unsure how long the rain continued in the night, but it is dry this morning, and may stay dry all day. We may not see any sunshine until around 8pm because prior to that it will be cloudy. The BBC, as in the screenshot above, shows white cloud, but the Met Office shows dark grey cloud, but both say it will stay dry. It will be a lot colder again today with just 18° C expected. Tomorrow could be very similar to today, but at the moment light rain is forecast for just 5pm, although the prediction shows a 15 to 23% chance for a lot of the afternoon. Once again it will be rather cool with 19° C predicted as a single peak at 5pm. Mostly it will be as low as 17° C.
 
   I suppose it's like many days these days, but yesterday was another day that was good and bad. Mostly the bad was in the late evening, but the seeds for that were sown earlier in the day. After my busy day the day before, I was quite content to be generally lazy in the morning - apart from writing 2,658 words yesterday morning !

  Yesterday I was supposed to be making some sort of effort to curb my appetite with the idea that I might improve my morning blood glucose readings, and ideally lose a bit of the recent small weight gain. I actually got off to a bad start by having two bowls of instant noodles for breakfast. Later on I would make worse blunders. For instance, my lunch was a couple of beef and onion slices.

  Those slices were not very nice, and I suspect they were pretty unhealthy. While they seemed quite stodgy, they didn't seem to fill me up, and I think I had some cheese and rice crackers after. What I can't remember was if I had that big lunch before I had a rather late shower. I think it might have been after the shower. What I do know for sure is that after my shower I left a single, small hand towel soaking in detergent, and it is still there this morning.

  I don't know why I am so insane to think that I am going to do any laundry, by hand, on an afternoon when I'll be drinking assorted beers ! I am not sure what time it was, but I seemed to think that Jodie arrived for our afternoon beer session a bit early. There was the usual delay while she fiddled with her lunch/dinner. Apparently the "really nice" vegetarian salad type thing she had bought was not as nice as she expected, and it needed potatoes with it. All I could offer, without a lot of messing around with cleaning and cooking some potatoes, was some potato salad....but the mayonnaise like stuff the potato was in was too slimy, and had to be washed off first.....

  Eventually she cracked open a tin of beer bought in Aldi. It was one I purposely ignored because it was a water melon flavoured pale ale. It sounded like it would be quite unpleasant, but apart from a rather bitter finish, it wasn't bad at all. The next beer was also one bought in Aldi, and while it was not good, it wasn't bad either. It may have been during that second beer that the man from Amazon delivered a parcel I was expecting.

  One of the two things in the parcel was a box of 100 blood glucose test strips for my Bayer Contour meter, and while useful for the future, was not very exciting. The other thing in the parcel was the 4 CD "box set" (which wasn't in a box) of songs from Woodstock. When I found it on Amazon there description of it was incredibly brief - no track lists, and no saying it was from the 1994 Woodstock.

   It may not have been a complete waste of £17.95, but it was a huge disappointment. A couple of the featured artists had played at the original Woodstock festival, but many had not started in the music business until many years after the original Woodstock. To make matter worse, it seemed that the recordings were not very good quality despite being described as from the original (or authentic) "broadcast tapes". I will have to give those CDs a better listen without Jodie criticising everything about it.

  After the start of the beer session it started to get quite boring with Jodie stuck on her phone, and me reading yesterdays, and the days before Metro newspaper. The monotony was broken by the arrival of Alan. He brought with him a thumb drive with a copy of an iso image of a SACD (super audio compact disk) - a format that Sony tried to capture the hearts of true audiophiles because of it's supposed better quality - a format that briefly peaked before hitting the dustbin of the past.

  Alan could not find anything to play the iso file directly, and neither could I. I could open the iso file in my archive manager, but I did not recognise any of the file types. It seems they were using a very rare file format. In the end I burnt the iso file to a recordable DVD, because it was too big for a standard CD, and that seemed a bit weird in itself. The DVD didn't help at all because all I could see were the same files as the archive manager showed. The final possibility was for Alan to find an old Sony SACD player on Ebay, and see if my disk would play on that.

  I think that is what Alan said he would do, and now I await with interest to see if the disk can actually be played on it. Just as the excitement over the SACD disk wound down another source of amusement arrived - Jodie's old friend Mark. It became a jolly drinking session with four of us, and it went on later than usual. I think it was gone 7pm before they all left. I know that it was so late that I only saw the last 20 minutes of Star Trek: Voyager, and I had missed to two preceding Star Treks.

  My plan was to have as little as two cans of very low sugar soup for dinner, and I almost did, except one can was "chunky minted lamb" flavour soup, and the other was actually a can of Tesco Irish Stew. Both contained only moderate amounts of sugar, but not as low as other flavours I could have had. I should have left it there, but I had other temptations - bad temptations !

  The most obvious was the tub of potato salad that Jodie had opened (and then rinsed of the creamy like stuff from the potato). There was half a tub left, and I decided I wanted to finish it off, but I made the even more stupid decision to fortify it by squirting some cream cheese on it, and then eat it by scooping it up with rice crackers. If anything was going to give me acid indigestion it was that potato salad, but I thought I had a possible counter to that.

  The day before I had bought a half pint (or was it actually a pint ???) bottle of milk for Patricia's coffee. Only a tiny bit was used for the coffee. In the past that bottle would probably just be left in the fridge until it turned into cheese or something most unpleasant. I thought a nice drink of cold milk would sooth my stomach. I then thought I may as well have some alleged sugar free choc chip cookies with the milk. It was nice, but I think it was just piling bad on bad in the end.

  I stayed up to watch QIXL, and it was a fair episode that I couldn't recall seeing before. I could have watched have I Got News For You after that, but decided to go to bed because I was feeling very tired. I got into bed and read for a while. I didn't seem to feel too bad, but at one point I had to cough, and it felt like my chest sort of bounced up and down, and it clicked as it came down again. Clicks like that often mean I am about to go through another "twisted rib" episode of chest pains.

  I don't think that my main problem. As soon as I turned on my side to go to sleep I had that annoying sensation that is a bit like acid indigestion, and a bit like angina. It could have been one or the the other, or maybe both, plus the "twisted rib" type of chest pain. I tried my usual remedies one after another, but allowing a bit of time for them to do their stuff. Maybe all helped a bit, but none cured. The only cure was to sit upright in my computer desk chair.

  I did that several times, and particularly towards the end it was getting too easy to fall asleep in the chair, but doing so would not be wise if I didn't want to fall off the chair, or to hit the computer keyboard with my forehead. I tried going back to bed a couple of times, but every time I laid down, even on either side, or on my back, the pain would return, although it was definitely worse when laying on my left hand side.

  It got to almost 3am before I was so tired, and the pain had slackened enough, that I fell asleep. I woke up about an hour later for a pee, and my chest was still hurting a bit, but not so bad that I couldn't get back to sleep after maybe 10 minutes. From then on I slept sort of OK, but just before 6am was far too early to get up after getting to sleep so late. I managed to get back to sleep, and sleep until almost 8am before I got up.

  This morning I had both a pee, and a small poo within 10 minutes of getting out of bed. I weighed myself and I found my weight was almost back up to the last time the nurse weighed my in the surgery, or about 3kg more than I was no more than a week ago, and possibly as little as 3 or 4 days ago. That was not good !

  My blood glucose readings were also terrible, although fortunately I didn't quite cross the red line into the danger zone, but only by the very smallest amount on one meter. The Contour meter read a bad 9.3mmol/l, and the GlucoRX meter was terrible at 9.9mmol/l. At least the Sinocare meter was just very slightly kinder with a reading of 9.4mmol/l.  At least my blood pressure continues to be in the "optimum area", albeit very slightly higher than my best. It is 113/51.

  With my next appointment for humiliation from the nurse set for next Thursday morning I have under a week to get healthy again. I've started off OK with just a single, small bowl of instant noodles for breakfast. I did considering skipping breakfast, but I could end up being tempted to eat all sorts of old crap if I start burping up the taste of the large cod liver oil capsule I have just taken. Breakfast generally stops that happening.

  If I can do it I will skip lunch today. It could be tricky because I feel pretty awful after not getting to sleep until 3am, and this cold and gloomy day does not help at all. Once again, if I can stick to my plans I will only have a chicken Caesar salad "kit" for my dinner. The only trouble is that I can't think of any good distractions from what could be a terribly tedious sort of day, today.