This morning is almost fresh, but it has started with full on sunshine. The sunshine should continue until sunset, but today will not be as hot as yesterday. Just 25° C is forecast. Tomorrow may feature a light splash of rain in the morning, and most of the day will be dull, but sunny spells might be possible for the last few hours of daylight. The temperature should peak at just 23° C.
° C. 
   Yesterday was a very busy day in way's I couldn't have foreseen. The first significant thing yesterday was foreseen, and it was to test my new kettle for real. There isn't much to say about such a mundane thing. It boiled water, and I used that to make my instant noodles, and that is about it.

  One thing I should have done yesterday, and I assumed I would do, was to have a nice cleansing shower, but I didn't ! I kept putting off the shower in favour of doing sweaty stuff. I must admit it might have felt nice to have had a shower before going to bed, but my then I don't think I even gave it any consideration. It all started with some laundry.
  I had a bit of a rest after writing yesterday's electronic diary, but not a long one before I decided to do some laundry instead of having a shower. I usually do any laundry after a shower, but not yesterday. I hand washed two pairs of long pants, a t-shirt and couple of pairs of underpants. I felt quite good about getting everything hanging on the line to dry by 11am.

  It was hot work, and I had some elevenses, or maybe a very early lunch. It was ice cream - the same Tesco plain vanilla ice cream that was probably responsible for my high blood glucose readings yesterday morning. Having examined the nutritional information more carefully, I could see why. It said that each scoop of ice cream had about 9.4gm of sugar in it. One problem here is that "scoop" is a very vague term.

  I compared that information with that on a small tub of ice cream that experiment seemed to suggest is a lot safer. That said that 1/3 of a tub, which I am guessing might be two scoops, only had 4.3gm of sugar in it, and if my guess that a third of a tub is equal to two scoops, then the good ice cream has about a quarter the sugar content. Anyway, I cheated, by eating the ice cream so early in the day It had little effect on my blood glucose this morning.

  I might have allowed half an hour for my elevenses/lunch to settle down before I did my next small task. It was to clear a lot of muck, including quite a bit of vegetation from the guttering of the lower roof. Fortunately it is fairly easy to do from the back bedroom window using a long pole with a small scoop fixed to the end. That "tool" (or bodge) was already still made up from the last time I did the job last year sometime.

  After dropping all the muck from the gutter onto the garden path, I had good reason to go outside to clean it up. I then went on to do more work in the garden under the hot blazing sun. The major task was to dig a small slit trench about 10 inches deep, and two foot long. For a professional builder that would seem no more than pin prick, but it seemed enough to cause me to break out into quite a heavy sweat under the bright sun.

  The trench was to receive the stinking, a real awful stink, sludge from the bottom of the garden waste wheelie bin. I held my nose, and emptied the bin into the trench, and quickly covered it over again. I then started filling the bin with what is supposed to be in there - twigs and old plants, and other organic garden detritus. I thought of using the strimmer, but the garden was dry enough that it was easy to pull up a fair bit, and there was also quite a bit of dead material laying around I could put in the bin.

  I doubt I spent much more than half an hour doing this "gardening", but it was quite sufficient to start the first twinges of angina. I could have done even more, maybe even got the strimmer out, but I felt I had done enough for a while. It seemed to have accomplished what I hoped for - reducing the stink from the bin to quite a low level, although I suspect my nose had became numb to the stench, but later on I went out there, and while I could still smell a bit of stink, it seemed far weaker than before.

  After I came in I rinsed off my arms and washed my hands in cold water before going up to me bedroom. Then, with the desk fan on full blast, I laid on my bed and read. I can't seem to remember if I did, or did not have a snooze. I'm inclined to think that I probably would have had a snooze, but not for long. I had other stuff to do, and about 3pm I got up, and went into the bathroom to hand wash a double fitted sheet, and a pair of pillowcases.

  A double fitted sheet is fairly big, but it is fairly easy to handle, although not so easy to wring out that well. I had taken in my first lot of washing, and it was bone dry after being in the hot sunshine. My next lot of laundry didn't have to be wrung out all that well to hang on the washing where any drips didn't matter (unlike if I had dried it on the clothes horse indoors).
  I admit it was getting a bit late when I hung the sheet and pillowcases on the line. It was unfortunate that some of the time they were out there on the line was during the hour or more when it clouded over, and almost seemed like it would soon be raining. It didn't rain, and the sun did come out again. I think it was around 6pm when I brought it all in, and only after I had taken it off the line did I notice a few very lightly damp bits at what would be the back of the sheet as it hung on the line, but those bit very quickly dried after I brought them inside.

  It was sometime after hanging the washing on the line, and having dinner, that I did another couple of odd jobs. They were not hot and sweaty work, but did soak up a bit of time. I edited a couple of recent recordings of The New Avengers - stripping off the crap before and after, plus all the adverts out of the middle.

  Being a weekday evening I had up to 4 episodes, one after another, of assorted Star Treks to watch. One episode was a bit boring, and a quick check on the electronic programme guide showed there was a fifth Star Trek episode from the original Star Trek series I could, and did watch.
  I had had the occasional nibble since having my early lunch (or elevenses), but nothing terribly significant. My dinner was, I hoped, going to be a safe end of the day meal. It was, as pictured above, an Iceland, "My Protein" Firecracker Chilli and meatballs. As the front of label says, it has only 512 calories, and on the back it showed quite a small amount of sugar in it. I it also shows three chillies on the front. Having had one of these a week or two ago, I thought that some hot pepper sauce might liven it up a bit.

  I must admit that although I am trying, and maybe even starting to learn/train myself, it is still difficult to not "top up" what seems like quite a small dinner. I was quite tempted to have something else after it, but I guess it was not that hard to resist it. I watched the last Star Trek (a very mediocre Star Trek: Voyager episode), and then started making plans for bed. Despite my dinner being spicy, I didn't seem to get any indigestion/heartburn, and so at about 9pm, with the fan blowing on me, I fell asleep, and generally I seemed to sleep well.

  I woke up a few time to pee in the night, although there seemed no urgency to do so.  Once again I seemed to have a long series of dreams set in a common background. This time it was about visiting the pirate radio station, Radio Jackie. They had hidden themselves in a disused chalk mine. It was a very big place, and they has set up some decoys for when officialdom came looking for them. They had spread a rumour that the mine was a hippy den, and had invited quite a few hippies to spend time in the mine.

  All the Radio Jackie people had long hair (the dream was set in the early 1970s), and so they hoped the officials would not know who was who. One curious thing is that the mine was brightly lit even though there were no obvious lights. It was as if it had been lit like a film set. I seemed to spend a long time in there, and yet I can't seem to remember anything I did, or even where I went, or at least nothing that is easy to describe "I visited many rooms in the mine".

  Yesterday morning I only did a couple of small poos, and I was feeling just a hint of constipation. It was probably just gone midday when I went "properly", and that may be why nothing has happened this morning, or not yet....maybe something is on it's way.....anyway, without even doing a morning poo, my weight seems to have dropped even more. It still is not as low, but only by a few hundred grams, as I have occasionally achieved, only as a one off, several times in the previous couple of months. Maybe this time it is a foundation I can build on, and get my average down another kilogram.

  This morning my blood glucose if finally down to some really good figures. The Contour meter read an almost wonderful 7.2mmol/l. The GlucoRX was not quite as good, but still very good, at 7.6mmol/l. The Sinocare meter was the very best with an extremely good 7.1mmol/l.  It seems getting the ice cream out of the way very early in the day, and then a very safe dinner worked a treat ! My blood pressure seemed very good too this morning. It was just 99/50.

  One of the first things I must do today is to wash my hair, and have a good shower. After that it is anyone's guess....I've just put my Nikon P500 "bridge camera" on charge in case I go out somewhere, but I may stay in and do more work. I have plenty of work to do in the garden, and I also have a double duvet cover to wash. Apart from the fact I expect to go out to the pub tomorrow lunchtime, tomorrow will probably be a bit dull to dry stuff outside, and it might even rain. Getting the duvet cover washed today, when it should be warm and sunny, sounds like it should be a priority, but if I get it down early enough I might find the energy to go out somewhere.