08:49 BST

 
  Yesterday was a good day, although most of it was not super great, but more like gently satisfactory. Even the weather was almost good for a while in the late afternoon. I spent much of the morning being very lazy, although, on reflection, I spent most of the morning writing.

  In fact, after a late start, after sleep later as a result of getting to sleep so late, and even then not sleeping that well, I started writing so late that it was almost midday when I finished. I then spent at least half an hour resting on my bed. I was roused from my reverie by the sound of letters coming through the letter box. One contained two bits of good news - both me electricity and gas accounts were very much in credit. At this rate I will have saved my own winter fuel allowance - which is good because unless the government does a U Turn, they will be letting pensioners freeze this winter.

  I did one thing that I had been meaning to do all week - going shopping in Iceland. It seemed too late to have a shower, but at around 1pm I ran a damp flannel over the worst bits, and sprayed on a bit more deodorant. I think I was probably fragrant enough, in a good way, to mingle with the great unwashed public shopping in Iceland.

   After my experience on Wednesday, when I tried to go for my usual Wednesday lunchtime drink, but had to turn back because of angina pains, I was dreading the walk to Iceland. Without really thinking of it, I seemed to be stress testing myself for the walk. I didn't take any pain killers, and I didn't even put sticking plasters over the bunions on my feet. There was some very light drizzle, almost no more than a fine mist, when I walked, and that made me push my speed up a little.

  To my amazement I made it to Iceland with only the very beginning of angina starting. Once I was in the store and walking slower, I had completely recovered before I reached the end of the first aisle.....mind you, I did stop to examine several different types of bread rolls to select those with the lowest sugar content. Almost everything I bought was low sugar. I seemed to be in a very disciplined mood !

   One of the things I bought was this "Slimming World" Korean style beef noodles. It is a long time since I have considered these "Slimming World" ready meals. Five or ten years ago they seemed most annoying. They may have been "calorie controlled" but that didn't mean they were actually low calorie, and a few were most definitely not low sugar. It may be they have changed over the years. Upon examining the nutritional information (because there was no simple "traffic light colours" simple panel, and no declaration of the calories per meal) I learned that it was actually quite good.

  It is mega annoying you have to do the maths to work it all out (I cheated and used a calculator). Only values per 100gm are shown and the entire meal is 550gm. That meant multiplying each figure by 5.5 to see exactly what you were consuming - no wonder so many slimmers fail ! I've done the relevant maths, and it turned out the entire meal contained 478.5 calories. That is probably quite good. The sugar content of nthe entore meal was just 1.65gm, and that is really quite good.


   I also bought another 3 ready meals from Iceland's "My Protein" range. The labelling is better on these, and the calorie content for the full meal is stated on the front of the pack. The sugar content is only shown on the back because they are mainly concerned with weight loss rather than diabetic meals. The ones I've already tried did seem to be fairly low sugar except for, I think, a teriyaki noodles meal. The sugar content in that was moderately high, and I think it did raise my blood glucose measurements a bit the next day.

  I was quite surprised to see my quite big shopping basket came to £52. That seemed a lot, and maybe these meals are not good value for money, but at least they are convenient, and considerably cheaper than Singapore Fried Noodles from the Tai Won Mein Noodle House. My shopping basket also included some other stuff like instant noodles, bottles of Diet Coke, and some cheese and stuff to put into the bread rolls I bought.

  The rain had changed from mist like drizzle to actually very light rain when I walk home with my shopping. Once again, the rain spurred me on to get home faster. I don't think I sustained a normal walking pace for any more than a few parts of of the walk home. I am sure it averaged out to be a little faster than I thought I would be comfortable with, and of course I was carrying moderately heavy shopping. It was another bit of stress testing, and once again it was only as i neared my front door that I felt the first twinges of angina.

  I am beginning to think that provided I could keep the pace low, and stop to take pictures every 5 minutes, I probably could tackle some longer walks without too much angina pain. If I did do that I might start to get some strength back into my legs. While I didn't get any nasty angina pains, my legs, and ankles, were definitely complaining more then my heart was.

  After I was home I decided to cook some lunch. In an ideal world I would have enough room in my freezer for a packet of chunky battered fish fingers, but I didn't. That meant I had to cook the whole lot before they defrosted and started to spoil. That didn't mean I had to eat the lot, but I did anyway. They may not have done my weight any good, but their sugar content was surprisingly low. I guess it was a rather big meal for a late lunch. The first fish fingers were very nice, but I almost had to force the last one down.

  I had a nice lie down after I had eaten my late lunch. It was almost a bit late for a traditional afternoon nap, but in reality that didn't mater - I had nothing else to do. I think I must have been laying on my bed for at least a couple of hours. I may have split that time between reading and snoozing. It was about 5pm when I realised that it was almost bright outside - certainly brighter than it had been all day. It seemed like it was my best chance to do more test shots using my new super zoom lens.
  My first shot sets the scene. It looks like I didn't even allow enough time for the camera to lock on to the best focus when I took this shot. I was using my Canon 650D camera for this and the other two shots. I had a Tamron 28 to 300mm zoom lens on it, and this shot was with the lens set to minimum zoom, 28mm. My target was the yellow flowers seen over two sets of garden fences in the distance.
  This is the view with the Tamron lens set to 300mm - full zoom. I should have taken more care to keep the camera still when using this amount of zoom - particularly when the light was still not bright enough to use a faster shutter speed. The picture looks a bit soft focus, but that doesn't really matter because it is only a reference of how closely my biggest lens could see before the new super zoom lens became my biggest lens.
  This picture was taken with the camera on my best tripod. The focus is not perfect for two reasons. To see through the window I had to have the tripod quite low, and it was difficult to stoop down to see through the viewfinder. That made manually focussing a bot trickier. Plus there was the problem that even on the tripod the slightest movement at the camera end translated to a huge movement of the distant subject. I almost had to hold my breath while trying to focus. I have to confess I got bored trying, and settled on this as the best I could manage under the circumstances.

  It is quite an impressive amount of zoom, and under more ideal conditions that cheap lens might produce some really great close ups. Ideal conditions would mean a nice bright sunny day so I could used the fastest shutter speed my camera can manage - which on the Cannon 650D is 1/4000th of a second. That is fast enough to freeze most action. It is quite possible than might make even hand held picture taking produce fair results.

  Obviously, for best results I tripod is the only answer, but even my sturdiest tripod has some wobble. So it would have to be tripod plus remote shutter release - fortunately I do have a remote shutter release device. It is unlikely I will want to carry even my lightweight tripod very far, and that means most pictures will probably be hand held, but with care, pictures such as of ships at sea, might come out looking OK. I just need a warm sunny day, and the willingness to brave my angina to go to the seaside.

  By the time I had finished playing with camera and lenses, I managed to miss most of the first two Star Treks shown last night, but I watched the next when I ate my Korean style beef noodles (as pictures further up the page). They were quite nice - mostly, but maybe not not nice enough to buy them again. They were almost filling. One thing I topped up on (and after my late lunch too) was some full fat ice cold milk. The main idea was that maybe that milk would help to counteract any heartburn. I may have worked because I didn't really have any heartburn last night.

  As usual (except on a Tuesday when Secrets Of The London Underground is shown at 8pm) I turned the TV off for an hour at 8pm, and went back to reading my book. At 9pm I turned the TV on again to watch and record The New Avengers. Once again I thought why am I bothering ? These last episodes of the second and final series were made in Canada, and seem to be really aimed for a North American audience. Most elements of humour seem to have gone, although some of the humour of the previous series was a bit too quirky to take seriously, and the final series of The (old) Avengers was little more than slapstick !

  Anyway, I watched and recorded it, and will have to watch it again when I edit the recording. It finished at 10pm, and I went straight to bed, but only to read for a while. I am surprised I was not really keen for sleep after my bad night the night before, but I must have read for maybe 20 minutes before turning out the light. I didn't seem like I would ever get to sleep, but I think the reality was that I was fast asleep not long after 10.30pm.

  Overall I seemed to sleep well. As noted a paragraph or two ago, I had no trouble with heartburn last night. I still had the usual mild annoyance of needing to pee every 2 or 3 hours through the night, but actually I barely notice it now.  I had more dreams last night that mixed up locations between telephone exchanges and TV repair workshops. I can't even attempt to describe those dreams because it seemed like as soon as something happened the dream would end, and another dream would start - usually in a slightly different location, room, or floor level.

  I was disappointed that when I got up I had a fairly large pee, but didn't poo at all. I blame that for my weight seeming to go up a lot this morning. I don't think I can blame that on water retention this time....but who knows. At least my blood glucose had dropped a decent amount this morning. Maybe the new batteries in the Contour meter might have helped in that respect.

  This morning, the Contour meter, with it's brand new batteries, read just 7.7mmol/l. That is rather good and the lowest reading I have had from any meter so far this month. Maybe it is time to change the batteries in The GlucoRX meter. It has been showing some unusually high readings too, although this morning it was a fair to good reading of 8.1mmol/l. The Sinocare meter was a bit better, and almost in the light green with a reading of 8.0mmol/l. At last, my blood glucose seems to be back on track.

  It is curious that I seem to be feeling a lot better, and my blood glucose readings seem to be dropping since I had my almost-but-not-quite heart attack on Wednesday. I might be tempted to say that something like a blood clot finally broke up and shifted after Wednesday. This morning it was not effort at all to produce a very low blood pressure reading. With zero preparation, the first and only reading I got was just 98/44, and a pulse rate of 53. I think that is good unless it may be a bit too low.

  I thought there might be some sunny spells to lure me out today, but from the colour of the sky at the moment, I think rain is more likely than sunny spells. I think I will be having a shower, and going out, but only another shopping trip to Savers and Poundstretcher - provided it does not start to rain too heavily. One job I need to do today is the clear the sink of washing up. There is not a great amount to do, but I have been trying to keep the sink and draining board clear since getting the new mixer tap fitted. Later today I can imagine doing more video editing because I still have a huge backlog of it to clear - and it is growing almost every day !