When I opened the curtains, at around 8am this morning, the sun was shining even though much of the sky looked grey. The sun is shining as I write this (at 9am), and it looks like some of that grey cloud is breaking up. I can see several fairly large blue areas of sky now. Sooner or later we may get the forecast light showers, but for now it is nice and bright. The forecast, as shown in the screenshot above, says there will be thundery showers, but unusually for the BBC, none are shown. However the Met Office s does show thunderbolts for 8 and 9pm tonight. Like yesterday, the temperature should reach 17° C again. Tomorrow is currently predicted to be dry, and quite dull, and it will be a lot cooler with only 15° C predicted. That could feel rather cool with no sunshine.

   I made the terrible mistake of believing the early weather forecast, and wrote yesterday off. As noted in the weather section at the top of the page, it was actually a fairly nice day, and had I known I might have forced myself to do something useful.

  I did do one useful thing yesterday morning, and it was to wash my hair, and have a shower. I have to admit I did feel a lot better for it after not washing my hair for maybe a week, and not having a shower for a day or two. The only trouble, if it can be put like that, is never took advantage of being clean and shining. I didn't go out, and I saw no one. I didn't even get the long meandering phone call from sue that I was expecting.

  One thing I did do, although I did not spend long doing it, was to check all my photos for the last two years to see if I had taken any pictures of Underground trains. I didn't think I had, but it was worth checking. Early last year I went to Southend Victoria station, and that meant getting a train from Liverpool Street station. To get there I took a Metropolitan (or maybe circle line) train from Cannon Street tube station. I was not using one of my big DSLR cameras, and while my Nikon P500 camera is very good in good light, it could not cope in the dim light of the tube station, and I only attempted to take one picture of a train down there, and it was just a horrible blur because of a very short shutter speed.

  One thing I didn't do yesterday was to practice safe eating. My lunch was just a can of soup, which could have been OK, but it was a can of Tesco's own Cream Of Tomato Soup, and the nutrition panel said it had a rather high 10gm of sugar in it (and I didn't look very closely, and it is possible that might have been for half a can !). To make matters worse, I added a lot of croutons, and then covered the whole lot with ready grated cheddar cheese. The sad thing is that while it was nice, it was not the pure ambrosia that I hoped it would be.

  I spent most of the afternoon either reading a book, or on my PC, and I would say that most of the time it was probably on my PC. Some of it was the checking for pictures of tube trains, as mentioned above. A little bit of it was perusing Amazon for some trinkets and toys. For some not easily explained reason, I have ordered a 10 inch portable LCD TV. It may be a bit more than just a TV. It also had inputs for external video from several types of sources. It might possibly make a nice big viewfinder for a mini camcorder - in the unlikely event I do any video recording.

  During the afternoon, at about 3pm, I stopped for a snack of rice crackers and just for a change, quite thinly sliced Red Leicester cheese.  I didn't want to over do it because I knew I had quite a big dinner coming up in a few hours time. It was the chicken, potato, cauliflower, and broccoli stew I had cooked for the previous day. It was quite nice - better than expected. One reason I didn't have it the night before was because I was worried it might be a bit bland.

  To help wash my dinner down I had two bottle of beer early in the evening. The first bottle was an Adnams "Old Ale", and it was good, although drinking it straight from the fridge  probably made it too cold to allow the best flavours out. I followed that with a room temperature bottle of Hogsback OTA (aromas over Tongham, and not arse over tit). That 10% beer was, once again, delicious. I can foresee ordering another dozen bottles when this lot is finished.

  I turned off the TV at 8pm when Star Trek: Voyager finished, It was another pretty bad episode, and not a patch on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. That was one of the few classic episodes, and it was about the three main Ferengi characters Quark, his brother, and Nog, being stranded on Earth back in 1947, and completely ridiculing the American army. Of course the three character managed to generate a time warp (or something) and all returned safely back to the 24th (or whatever) century.

  Soon after 8pm I was reading in the warmth of my bed. The plan was to be asleep by about 9pm, but that never happened. I felt uncomfortable when I tried to sleep, and there were several ways I was uncomfortable. One was just the typical newly discovered lumps in my pillow, and newly discovered lumps in my mattress. The more annoying thing was a mild stomach ache with lots of grumbling, glooping, and other unpleasant internal noises from my gut.

  I am unsure of the cause that stomach upset. I thought it might be building up to some explosive diarrhoea, but in the end it just seemed to be wind. I think it was a more specialised clause of Sods Law that I hardly farted at all on the numerous times I went to the toilet, but often after getting back from the toilet I would emit a few "duvet lifters", and they were most aromatic.....to put it one way.  It may have been after 11pm before I got to sleep, and my gut didn't trouble me a bit after that.

  I think I slept OK for the rest of the night. Once again (and this is getting an annoying habit) I can remember having many dreams, but I can't seem to remember any of those dreams. I do remember getting up to pee 3 or 4 times in the night, but only on one of those occasions did I seem to take more than a couple of minutes to get to sleep again. The only bad sleep was when I woke up just a few minutes before 6am, and wanted to get at least another half hour of sleep. I sort of did, but I find it hard to remember if I was awake of asleep for much of the next 30 to 40 minutes.

  I think the nest I can say is that I think I felt better when I got up this morning than I did the previous morning. I had one more pee before I weighed myself. I assumed after all the bother the previous night, I would be having a big poo this morning, but so far it has just been a very small amount of wind passed. No poo is unfortunate because it makes it seem that I put on a whole 300gm yesterday. That is not a lot, and maybe after all I ate I should have expected some weight increase, but a good poo might have weighed half or more of that increase, and the increase would not be too bad at all.

  My blood glucose readings this morning were 2 out of 3 ain't bad. The Contour meter read a nice 7.7mmol/l, and the glucoRX meter read an even better 7.1mmol/l. Once again the Sinocare meter read high, but this morning it wasn't into the pink zone, but in the neutral zone with a reading of 8.2mmol/l. This morning I did the readings in reverse to see if that made any difference. I also drew a big bead of blood when I pricked my thumb, and i used that one big bead of blood for all meters. It didn't seem to make any difference at all to my usual way.

  This morning my blood pressure is very high (by comparison with my normal), and that was not surprising after sneezing in the middle of checking it. I had to allow a few minutes for things to stabilise before checking again. This second time it was very slightly higher than my typical, but 108/45 is still very good, and according to the scale on the blood pressure meter, still in the very best "optimum" area.

  As I write this we have lost the earlier sunshine, and the pavement outside looks damp as if we have just had a brief light shower. I assume that reality has caught up with the forecast, and any ideas of possibly going out for "fun" have completely evaporated now. I think I will still go out to get some shopping from Tesco, but if I am lucky I can time it to miss any showers.....well maybe not time it, but just rely on nothing but luck. Of course, having just said the sun has gone in, it has now come out again !

  Some of today I will probably pass sifting through another couple of years of photos to see if I managed to take any decent pictures of tube trains. I can probably skip the Covid lock down years, but I seem to recall a few years earlier I did go for a few trips on the Underground to pass a few empty days. When I go even further back in time I might find some older train stock being used, and I'll have to decide if I will make a new spreadsheet, or fit the pictures in the current spreadsheet.

  One bit of good news from yesterday.... I thought the medical profession had just about forgotten my existence, but maybe that is only the cardiology department. The diabetic department haven't forgotten me. Yesterday I got a letter to say that my next diabetic, retinopathy screening is scheduled for the 14th of next month. There is a good chance that a November day may be dull and gloomy, and that is just perfect for when my pupils are dilated after the drops they put in to make photographing the back of the inside of the eyeball easier, and everything looks ten times bright than it should !