09:36 BST

 
  Yesterday brought good times and bad times, although most times were quite bland. The very worst times were late evening, and once again I missed out on a good night's sleep. One the plus side, what may have caused the bad/terrible evening, was very delicious !

  Yesterday I was expecting my new super zoom lens to be delivered by Amazon, and I wondered if it might be an early delivery like the previous one, or a more typical late afternoon/early evening delivery. To be safe I made sure I had my morning shower very soon after I finished writing. Only after I was dry and dressed did I embark on some professional level laziness by laying on my bed reading. Despite a desire to stay on high alert I lapsed into a short snooze.
  At 10:30am it was very dull, but the forecast rain hd not started. It would not be long before it did. This was the view from my partly open (about 5 inches) bathroom window. I took it using my phone on a "selfie stick" using my bluetooth remote shutter button. It seems a lot easier to use that method rather than clambering in the bath.
  Less than half an hour later I took this picture through the back bedroom window. It was even duller outside, and there was a short burst of quite heavy rain. For this picture I used my Canon 650D camera, and it was manually focussed on the raindrops on the outside of the glass. It was partly to show it was horrible and wet outside, but it was also an experiment.

  My new super zoom lens, which was delivered yesterday afternoon, is cheap because it has no aperture control, and no automatic focus. The aperture is effectively set by how much zoom is in use. At full zoom it is the equivalent to quite a small aperture. That is part good because it gives a better depth of field. I considered my eyes to be a bit wonky to use manual focus, but maybe that was based on trying to manually focus small faces at a distance on a dimly lit stage. The picture of the raindrops seems to be very sharp, and that was done on full manual. Maybe I am better than I thought.

  I mentioned yesterday morning that I put some sausages in the mini oven/grill to cook at the same time I was making my breakfast of instant noodles. I also mentioned the time got stuck just before it was due to turn the oven off, By the time I saw what was going on I saw the sausages were looking very brown ! At around midday I tried them. I ate 3 of the 5 sausages, and ate them cold. They were still quite nice, possibly even nicer than when properly cooked, but the outer couple of millimeters was getting close to being charcoal !

  It would have been useful to go out shopping yesterday, but with my delivery expected at some unknown time I could not be sure to be in when it came if I did go out. Instead I just slouched around, spending a lot of time on my bed reading, but also doing a few minor things like washing up my breakfast noodle bowl, and a few bits of cutlery. Jodie arrived soon after we had the very heaviest downpour. She seemed to have dodged the worst of it.

  Once Jodie arrived I sent a text message to Michael to remind him he was very welcome to join us. It took an hour or two before he replied to say he couldn't make it today (Yesterday), but hoped to see me/us sooner or later. Jodie was in one of her "beered out" moods after another heavy session the night before, and a probably heavy session later in the evening. It meant she only wanted to open low to moderate strength beers.

  That suited me because most of the lighter beers would probably, and were more pleasant than some of the stronger mad hipster fruit sour beers that Jodie likes, and I hate ! One surprise (to me) was that one bottle was not beer but mead. The only mead I had tried in the past was not all that nice, although I did note it seemed to be better when aged for several or more years. The bottle of mead Jodie opened yesterday had been bought from the Catford Food Market.

   They have a regular sales stall from the Brockley Brewery, who brewed the mead. It really tasted of honey, and was quite nice, although it was incredibly lively, and frothed up all over the table when first opened. That was possible bad news because all that secondary fermentation suggested extra honey had been added before bottling, and thus it's sugar content may have been rather high.

  It was a little before 5pm when the man from Amazon delivered my new super zoom lens. It was smaller than the photographs of it suggested it might be, but it was not as light as expected. I had assumed that being a cheap Chinese lens, costing as much as 50 times less than a similar lens made by Canon or Nikon, it would have cheap plastic lenses, but it seems they are real glass, and seem to be rather well made.
  The sky was very dull when I took the test shot above. For such a long range zoom lens (800mm) a tripod is almost essential, but In took the above picture freehand. Tracking the helicopter while trying to get it in focus was not easy, and in fact I never did get it perfectly focused before the thing had flown outside the frame. Nevertheless, for a hand held, manually focussed picture of a fast moving object on a very dull afternoon, seemed like a success to me.

  I have high hopes that for a slow moving thing, like a ship at sea (which may only appear to be slow moving), and in bright sunshine on a clear day, I may be able to get some good shots using the camera hand held. Dragging a tripod all the way to the seaside would indeed be a drag, but to get nearer to perfection it might be the only choice. One thing seems fairly sure now, I didn't waste my £72.22 when I bought this lens.

  Jodie left in time to catch the 5.34pm train to London where she would be meeting Alan for more boozing. As soon as she left I put my dinner in the microwave to heat up. It was Singapore Fried Noodles - the second part of my takeaway from the previous night. Once again it was very delicious, although maybe only 95% delicious compared to the previous one I had. It seemed more filling than the previous one despite being in exactly the same sized container.

  I ate it while watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It may have been very filling, but I (probably) stupidly decided I was going to eat "no added sugar" very thin, chocolate coated, oat biscuits. It is possible it was those oat biscuits that tipped me over the edge, although I think the troubles I had could be blamed purely on the fried noodles, and maybe helped by the beer I had.

  Skipping over the TV I watched, I got into bed (yes, I am now feeling like it is already deep into autumn) to read and then sleep. I didn't feel all that comfortable while reading, but it wasn't that bad. As soon as I turned the light out, and turned over to sleep, I was hit my terrible heartburn - bad enough that it was like Angina heading into heart attack territory.. It is getting a bad habit again, and I might have to start taking Esomeprazole tablets again to kill the heartburn. The only catch is that those tablets have some negative effects.

  Sometimes I wonder if my stomach has come loose inside me because that heartburn only seems to happen when laying down on my side. If I sit upright at my computer desk it fades away, although it can take some time. Even with antacid tablets and mixture, it was gone 1am (or was it 2am ??) before I was just about OK to get to sleep in my bed. I almost fell asleep, and maybe did fall asleep for a few seconds, when sitting in front of my computer reading stuff from World Nuclear News !

  Once I got to sleep I seemed sleep fairly well. It was a bit like the night before - I remember having dreams, but not any details from them, and getting up for a pee once or twice (maybe 3 times) was more like a dreamlike experience. Instead of getting up at around 6am, I managed to sleep through to about 7.30am, and that is a sort of rare treat, but very welcome after two nights of bad to terrible sleep.

  I was pretty sure I needed a poo when I got up, and I did. This was of course a good thing. What was not so good was that rather stupidly I forgot I also needed a big pee. I weighed myself after that poo, and was disappointed to see I had put on a little more weight. I was almost back to where I started. Fortunately, when I went down to prepare my breakfast, just a single small (60gm ?) packet of instant noodles, I was forcibly reminded that I needed a pee. One I had brought my breakfast back to my computer desk I had that pee, and it was quite a big one. This time when I got on the scales I saw I had actually lost a useful bit of weight.

  Unfortunately, like everything in life, there is good and bad, and that was the case with my blood glucose measurements. The Contour meter might possibly be faulty, I think I'll put new batteries in it for tomorrow to see if that gets it back in line with the other two meters. It's bad news this morning was two identical readings of 9.5mmol/l (I did it twice to confirm this rather bad reading). The other two meters, the GlucoRX and the Sinocare meters agreed exactly on a reading of 8.5mmol/l - neither good nor bad.

  Once again I can take solace in my blood pressure reading this morning. It was just 106/50. That is in the "Optimum" region, and almost identical to yesterday morning. Incidentally, I took a few readings while I was suffering from heartburn last night, and a typical reading I was getting, and have often seen before in some parts of the evening, was 133/64 ("normal - high" according to the scale on the blood pressure meter). It was when my blood pressure suddenly fell to somewhere in the region of 111/52 that I seemed to feel OK. I am not sure which caused what, but there must be some sort of clue in that observation that maybe only a good doctor could decipher.

  Today I really must try and get out to get the shopping I have been meaning to get almost all week. despite the place being really unfriendly, and repellent since they brought in the self checkouts, I have to go to Iceland to get the foods I feel I need - stuff from their "My Protein" range which is generally, but not always low calorie, and low sugar. Hopefully they will have now stocks of Diet Coke in too.

  Also hopefully, I will be able to get there and back without any angina pains. If I do, then there is a microscopic chance I might go out again for more shopping. I hope there is no need, but hope does not always win out, but it would be prudent to stock up on more antacid tablets and potions. A wander around Poundstretcher might be useful provided I am not tempted to buy tasty stuff that is not good for my dietary needs.  There is an even more microscopic in the extreme chance I could go to a gig tonight. It's stupid even mentioning it because I already know that that I'[ll be staying in the warm and dry tonight....well dry, but maybe not warm. I refuse to help line the pockets of the electricity barons, but putting on any heating until at least November.....I hope.