Friday 2nd August 2024

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Friday 2nd August 2024

09:01 BST

Yesterday was one time the BBC's fetish for thunderstorms was correct...or almost correct. After mostly sunny spells from late morning to around 4pm, the sky started getting rather cloudy, and I heard the first distant peal of thunder at nearly 6.30pm. Ten or so minutes later I saw a distant flash. More flashed and rumbles of thunder followed, but it all seemed to several miles or more away. I think we only had one very heavy downpour, but even that didn't last long. Most of the time it just seemed light rain. The most significant thing was how humid it seemed to get, and that lead on to the stickiest night I have endured all year. The temperature peaked at around 28° C.

I saw mist shown on the tail of yesterday's forecast from as early as 4am. I never observed any then because I was mostly sleeping, but I did look out the window at 6 and 7am, and at worst there was a very slight haze, but definitely no fog. The latest revision to the forecast has not really changed anything, and sunny spells are still predicted from 11am after a rather dull morning. By 3pm there might be full sunshine, and the temperature should peak at 26° C. Tomorrow's forecast has changed a lot, and partly for the better - but not much. Tomorrow is Petts Wood Calling - an outdoor music festival that I hope to be attending, Yesterday they were predicting thunderstorms for the middle of it. That has now changed to being a mostly grey day with some occasional showers. There might be few showers, but they could extend much later into the evening compared to the previous predictions of thunderstorms. It is going to be a lot cooler at just 23° C, although all this forecast refers to the Catford area, and Petts Wood is some way away, and the weather could be a fair bit different - better of worse !

I don't think I planned to do it in advance, but I took a holiday from watching my sugar and calorie intake yesterday. I didn't go too wild about it, and by chance a lot of what I ate was not that bad, but it is still interesting to see the results of it today.

Having washed my hair the previous day, I only had a simple shower yesterday morning. It was actually near the end of the morning. Once I was fully dressed to go out I did one important thing before I went out shopping. That important thing was to bring the newly emptied brown, garden waste, wheelie bin through the house, and into the garden where sooner or later I will start filling it with more weeds and stuff.

That all sounds perfectly reasonable until you realise that the bin had been emptied for the first time in about a year, and as well as garden waste I was treating it more like a compost bin, and putting waste food in it. It must have been mostly that food that had decayed over the year to leave the close equivalent to farmyard slurry in the bottom. It really stank to high heaven, and left a disgusting train of stink as I brought it through the house. It seemed to take ages for that stink to disperse.

Having opened a few windows, and used some air freshener spray it seemed like I had the stink under control. It could have been a tragic mistake, but I got away with leaving the dining room window open when I went out. That was not quite as mad as it seems because it is sash window, and the bottom half has bolts through it that stop it being opened even when the top half is open.

My destination when I went out was to Aldi. I started out not feeling very good, and wondering how awful it might be when I had to walk back with shopping. It was strange that although I started out feeling mildly rough, it never got any worse. It did mean that I couldn't really enjoy the walk there, and back again, but at the same time it was never to arduous. I'm sure I walked a little bit slower than usual, but I think it only made a 5 minute walk and 5 minute and 10 seconds walk.

I had several items in mind to buy from Aldi. One was a ready roasted chicken that I could pull apart and eat cold for my dinner. I also wanted some drinks, and I did buy quite a few. I bought three 2l bottles of Diet Coke plus one 2l bottle of Aldi's own brand "diet" Lemonade. On top of that lot I also bought three one litre bottles of flavoured limeades - one was blueberry flavour, another was peach flavour, and the last one was kiwi fruit flavour.

Everything else I bought was mostly random small stuff, although it did include a small 150gm, bag of (alleged) cheeseburger flavoured crisps. Other stuff was things like sausage and peanuts, and a small tub of their lowest (which is not particularly low) sugar ice cream. At the end I thought I struck lucky by finding a checkout with no queue. I soon found out why others were shunning it. There was a woman being served who was spending most of her time apparently sending text messages. The man on the checkout had put all her stuff through the scanner, and much of it was piled up ready for her to bag it up, and then to pay for it. it seems her text messaging took priority, and she stood there ignoring the world, as if she had all the time in the world, until she finished her message, and than started to put a lot of her shopping in bags. hen there was the expected pantomime of trying a few credit/debit cards, and trying to remember pin numbers. It may have taken her 10 minutes to go through the checkout, but I think I managed it in under a minute - and I probably had as mch shopping as she had.

It was good and bad to get out of the store. It was good because that experience at the checkout was annoying, but it was bad because while it had never felt cool going into the store, it did feel like walking out into live steam ! Fortunately I seemed to re-acclimatise myself to it very quickly, and while I was lightly sweating carrying all my heavy shopping home, I didn't feel like I was getting even close to feeling too hot.

It was still nice to get home though. Carrying 11 litres (approx 11kg) in just soft drinks is a bit taxing, and I imagine the rest of my shopping added 2 or 3kg to that - maybe more. I was most happy when I had put all my shopping away, and could rest a while, and eat my lunch. Lunch was my first big deviation away from safe eating. It was principally a cheese and smoked ham sub type sandwich. I followed that with 3 or 4 Aldi own brand version of Pepperami sticks.

After that it was mostly a matter of lazing around waiting for Jodie, and a later on, Michael to arrive for some beer tasting. I should have spent some time finishing washing my favourite bath towel. I got halfway through and then sort of gave up. Like all of yesterday, it seemed to be a very sticky day, and washing a towel is a bit taxing - more so when you are feeling hot and sticky before starting.

It has to be said at this point that much of my stickyness could probably be attributed to very high blood glucose. My morning readings had been high, and that cheese and smoked ham sub roll would not have helped. It was also the reason I seemed to feel I was running out of energy when washing the towel. It was also ironic that Jodie sent me a massage saying she would be late, and in theory I had an extra hour when I could have finished that towel instead of laying on my bed reading and snoozing.

Jodie arrived at about 4.10pm, and Michael arrived about an hour later. We had some nice beers, and Michael was impressed with one of the German pilsner beers I had bought with him in mind. I'm glad that Michael had joined us. As expected he had an awful lot to say about the troubles with his dementia suffering wife. He needed an outlet to just talk about it all. Some of it was mildly interesting, but some of it went in one ear and out the other. I know it is a great help to let him unload so much, and sadly it is about the only help we can give him.

Jodie left to get the 6.30pm train, and Michael left a bit later - just in time to miss the first light rain, and several peals of distant thunder, but in time to get home in time to watch Star Trek: Voyager, and his lady love, Captain Janeway (whoever though that that old frump could ever seem sexy ???). I quickly got my dinner ready, It didn't need much effort at all to take the wrapper off a ready roasted chicken, and the lid off a small tub of potato salad.

The only trouble with that dinner was that even with the potato salad it seemed to be a bit stodgy. I guess it was a sort of warning that I was eating too much of it (approx both breasts), and also a warning that it might have undesired consequences later. I made things worse by opening, and eating half the small (150gm) bag of cheese burger flavour crisps.

After another boring episode of Star Trek: Voyager had finished there was an hours wait for more TV. I spent some of that hour laying on my bed reading. While doing that I could feel indigestion starting up. That process was complete when I saw who was one of the panel guests on QI. It was Johnny (Mr Thicko) Vegas. As soon as I saw him I turned off in disgust. I can't stand him ! Itb was just gone 9pm, I was feeling tired, and seemed a golden opportunity to get some nice sleep.

That never happened. It could have been the booze, or what I ate raising my blood glucose dangerously high, or mostly it was just the heat and humidity, but I felt very hot and sweaty when I tried to lie down for sleep. Also, and even worse, was as soon as I laid down my indigestion/heartburn kicked in full strength. I was expecting it to probably happen. As I mentioned yesterday, I have stopped taking the Esomeprazole tablets to relieve or stop heartburn. I was not sure how quickly their help would fade, and whether a week with no heartburn would help to somehow heal "something".

Evidently the effect stopped very quickly, and everything was back to the recent normality. I guess I was taunting things by my choice of dinner, and having it so late in the evening. Once again it was the same old thing. The pain was worse when laying on my side in bed, and could disappear if I sat up in my desk chair. I think it was gone 1am before either much of the food causing the problem had sauntered off down the small intestine, or I was so tired that I could fall asleep despite the pain.

There was one other problem before I managed to fall asleep, and when I woke up in the night - my pillow was soon wet with sweat (or strictly speaking it was the protective towel on the pillow that became saturated with sweat). I think it was at 5am when I woke up and could not find a single dry area of towel that I changed towels to a nice fresh one (that was very damp when I eventually got up just before 8am.

Having a sleep in until just before 8am helped offset getting to sleep so late, but I still got up feeling bad. For one thing my cough was back, but in a different way. Any tickly throat had long gone, but this morning I seemed very congested, and I was easily coughing up some thick mucus. That seems to have finally stopped now it is 10.30am as I write these words. Apart from that cough I still felt fairly crap. It was nothing specific but small heaps of this and small heaps of that, etc.

In my estimation, everything I ate yesterday should have been good enough to push my already high blood glucose through the roof - unless there was something to my theory that the Esomeprazole tablets were interfering with my glucose processing. It will take a few more days, and more experimentation, but at the moment it is looking like my theory could be on the right track.

This morning my blood glucose is indeed high, but not terribly so. For a time it seemed that maybe it was a little lower, but when looking at the results properly I see it is still about as high as the averages of the last 8 or 9 days. This morning the Contour meter read 9.1mmol/l, and that is slightly higher then yesterday. The GlucoRX meter read 9.7mmol/l, and thyat also is slightly higher than yesterday. The Sinocare meter read 10.0mmol/l, and that is a lot higher than yesterday. On the other hand, yesterday was the result of eating very carefully the day before, and the results were usefully lower than the preceding 3 or 4 days, and today's reading compare very favourably with those.

I am going to try and eat a bit more carefully today, but even if I don't I will have a much better chance tomorrow when I hope I will find the energy and enthusiasm to spend the whole day out at Petts Wood Calling. It would be a shame to miss it, particularly when I merit a back stage pass, but on the other hand, there are quite a few bands/acts that I do not like. Oh well, I'll worry about all that tomorrow morning.

I guess that today there are only a few things I want/need to do today. The simpler things are to finish washing my favourite bath towel, and to wash up all yesterday's beer glasses, and a few other bits and pieces in the kitchen sink. Slightly more optional, but if I can I will wash two more towels - just had towels. One is the sweat soaked towel I took off my pillow this morning, and the other was hanging in the bathroom until I thought I caught a whiff of it starting to get a bit too stale for use by any guests who might use my bathroom (which is usually only Jodie, occasionally Michael, and even more rarely a few others. The sweat soaked towel will take priority. It was my intention to wash the towels I use as pillow protectors more frequently, but maybe I didn't mean this frequently.

2564 words today