This morning's version of The BBC's version of the forecast was a bit eccentric, and still is. They are forecasting hurricane strength winds of 400mph ! Curiously, The Met Office says mild breezes as high as 8mph ! I wonder if The BBC is showing a forecast for an American Catford of something. The rest of the forecast does agree with The met Office. It is a damp morning - either from drizzle or light rain (it is difficult to tell from indoors). The temperature seems to have risen to 10° C as I write this. Sunny spells this afternoon may only raise the temperature to a rather chilly 11° C. Tonight the temperature will drop a lot ! It could be down to just 4° C by 7am tomorrow morning, but maybe non stop sunshine could raise it to 12° C. Tomorrow will also see imaginary 408mph winds too !

   Yesterday was all about waiting for parcel deliveries - two of them. With the benefit of hind sight I could have had a shower, and gone to the pub provided I didn't stay there too long. It was 11:51am before I was notified that one parcel would arrive between 15:00 - 17:00 , and the other just had the usual Amazon estimate of "before 9pm".

  I had a very lazy morning, although after my usual post-writing rest, I did do one very useful thing. It seems it was almost a year ago that I got so drunk in the Jolly Farmers, drinking with Kevin if I recall correctly, that I fell down twice in the park on my walk home. I had my best laptop in a designed for a laptop rucksack. Maybe that protected it from the worst damage, but it did seem to damage the track pad in some way.

  There was no obvious damage, but it seemed like the equivalent of the left mouse button was almost permanently operated. I only discovered this after once again taking the laptop to a pub (the local, and now shutdown, Wetherspoons), and the pointer was leaving a trail of mouse clicks behind it. I thought the cure would have to be to disconnect the trackpad, and use a proper mouse - which was always my preferred way of using it - I can't really get on with trackpads,

  Opening up the laptop to disconnect the trackpad could probably have been a really tedious job, and so with a spare laptop ready to go, if the need arose, I didn't get around to looking at the best laptop until yesterday morning - almost a year later (although I don't know the date it all happened off the top of my head). Yesterday the cure turned out to be possibly not even needed.

  It seemed like the fault had already cured itself. I am wondering if it might have been some water had somehow got into the trackpad, although I don't know how. In case it was an intermittent fault I did a "software" remedy. It seemed I could turn off the trackpad in the BIOS (or Dell set up program), although that didn't actually seem to work. However there was also an easy way to turn it off in the desktop setup of MX Linux. There was a choice of trackpad, PS2 (equivalent) Mouse, or both with automatic switching between them depending on whether a mouse was plugged in. I opted just for an external mouse.

  That was not the end of my time with that laptop. After a year of being neglected the battery was almost flat, and needed fully charging. The spare battery was the same. There was also over 300 updates needed. Unlike the horror stories I read about Windows 10 or 11, doing those 300+ updates took no more than about 15 minutes, and no restart was required. One thing about that laptop that I probably saw once, but it never registered, is that it uses an 8 core processor. In theory it is more powerful than my desktop PC !

  I thought I had at least a couple of hours to wait before my first parcel was delivered, and I used a bit of that time to have a bowl of Oxtail soup. I am unsure if it was the hot chilli sauce I added that killed the flavour, without really making it more than warm, but it was curiously slightly tasteless. It was not long after having that soup when the doorbell rang, and my first parcel had arrived.

 The earliest it was supposed to arrive was 3pm, but I think it was around 2.45pm. If I had gone to the pub I really would have had to make sure I didn't dawdle getting home. Typically it is usually gone 3pm before I get home after a bit of train spotting on the way. That parcel did not included the "toy" I was waiting for, but it did contain a measuring jug for the kitchen - one with a far easier to read scale.
  The parcel also had a few low cost items bought out of curiosity, and originally to bump the price up towards enough for free delivery. In the end I added a semi expensive toy that was enough for free delivery by itself. The little cheap trinkets were bottle openers in the style of guitars. Two of them also had magnets on the back to use as fridge magnets. the picture shows them stuck to the little beer fridge in the dining room.

  The others were plain, and probably made of "chineseium", a metal that will fracture and break after a few uses. I'm not even sure they are the right design to open all but the smallest crown caps on beer bottles without a bit of cursing and swearing. It is possible that Jodie or Michael may covet one of these bottle openers.

  My second parcel arrived not much later at about 4.40pm. It was my new "toy". In fact it is not a toy at all except in the sense it may not get a lot of use after the novelty had worn off. It is a 10 inch colour TV. It's main attraction is that it has quite a few inputs, and one I could imagine using to connect to a camera, and use the TV as a big viewfinder. The description on Amazon didn't really show all it's good bits.

  I think I knew it came with an aerial, but I didn't realise it had a built in amplifier that is powered from the 5V from the USB socket on the TV. I was not even aware it had a USB socket. I was also unaware that the TV had a built in rechargeable Lithium batter in it. No information was given in the thin manual about how long that battery will last, but it could be several hours of more.

  The most intriguing thing is that the TV also had a slot for a micro-SD card. As I was hoping, you can record TV onto that card, and I did record an episode of QI on it last night, and watched it back on my PC. It seemed to be a perfect recording. I get the impression the software was never really finished in the TV. When using the Electronic Programme Guide, it seems only possibly to see now and the next program. I can't quite remember what the hint was, but it seemed like the original intention was to be able to set a future programme to record on a timer.

  I think the big hint was when I somehow found a list of where future times recordings would be show, but there just seemed no way to populate it, and there is nothing in the manual about it. I suspect that the software is hacked from that for a big, mains power only, TV where it can be on standby without draining the batteries (if it is running on battery power). At the moment, the TVs main use could be to record programmes (manually) while watching a different channel on my PC. There are also a few channels that only display as a blank screen on my PC, although curiously enough, if I record them the playback works shows a perfectly good picture.
  My dinner was another Tesco "calorie controlled" ready meal. It was a cottage pie that looked nothing like the picture on the packet. I must admit I used the faster microwave cooking method, as shown on the back of the packet, and so it lacked the crispy burned bit at the top, but that would not affected the look of the filling as being very thin, and a lot more homogeneous rather than seeming to have more obvious bits of beef. I didn't check, but the top may have been mashed sweet potato. That would give it it's pale pinky-orange colour, but should still have been very nice. Instead I didn't really enjoy it at all. Oh well, 237 calories is pretty good, and 9.5gm of sugar is OK.

  I think I ate two packets of crisps after that cottage pie just to add some flavour and to make my dinner a bit more fulfilling. As usual I ate my dinner while watching on of the Star Treks. Deep Space Nine was a weird episode, and not really enjoyable. Star Trek: Voyager was so dull I can hardly remember what it was about. While I was supposed to be watching it, I was playing with my new TV.

  I was intending to be asleep by, or at lest soon after, 9pm last night. It didn't happen because of "digestive" problems again. I did have some mild indigestion, but nothing a couple of antacid tablets soon calmed down, but it was the other end that seemed to give the most discomfort. It was, and probably was bloat caused by a lot of gas build up.  I stayed up an extra hour to make occasional visits to the toilet to see if anything more than gas would happen. Fortunately releasing sufficient gas was enough to get comfortable.

  I attribute some of that discomfort to the sort of constipation I had yesterday morning. I did eventually go, and went several times, but it somehow never seemed quite as much as I expected. I probably should have taken a couple of laxative last night because I may be having the same problem this morning.

  During that extra hour, and the visits to the toilet, I may have peed enough that it seemed like I didn't seem to pee much in the night. In fact I think I may have only got up to pee twice, and one of those times was only a bit before 6am when I might have got up. I actually did get up at gone 7am after an unexpected hour of sleep. I thought I probably sleep well last night, but I did seem to dream a lot.

  Most of my dreams seemed very random, and at least what seemed like one dream was most probably lots of little dreams that seemed like episode of the same story, and yet the settings did seem to change. One dream may have started at London Bridge station, although it was a bit different to reality. It seemed to have high level and low level platforms. I remember watching a train apparently accelerating towards a white tiled brick wall, but the track curved around, and hen the train was going away from me towards Waterloo East station.

  I can't remember if I had an actual destination when I went down the stairs to the low level platforms (which don't exist in reality). At the bottom of the stairs I found myself in a sort of canteen. I saw people eating cakes with coffee. I don't think I fancied eating or drinking anything because I needed to go to the toilet. I left the canteen and went up some ordinary domestic stairs, and at the top was my bathroom, although it seemed to have a large bubble glass window in the door.

  I couldn't go in there because a woman was just running a bath for herself. I turned around, and went to my bedroom. I passed two more women, and both said I would have to wait until they had showered, bathed, washed their hair etc. I must confess I succumbed to misogyny as muttered under my breath "blood women, taking hours in the bathroom !". As I entered my bedroom the dream sort of fade out.

  When I got up, after my extra sleep in, I seemed to feel curiously OK, although maybe I was comparing it to how I had woken up in the night with both my arms and hands having fallen asleep, and seeming quite numb for a few moments. The right arm recovered in seconds, the left arm took longer to recover - possibly a minute or even two. As usual I had a pee, and contrary to what I wrote a paragraph or two back, I did have a poo, although once again it seemed smaller than expected.

  I then got on the scales, and expected that I might have lost another very small amount, but it seems it was the opposite. I seem to have put on 400gm. Maybe a small backlog of poo could account of maybe half that, but that would still leave an increase of 200gm. I knew I had maybe a snack too many, but even my snacks were supposed to be "mostly harmless". maybe the one thing I lacked was any exercise, but even a 3 mile walk does not burn that many calories.

  It made me a bit pessimistic about my blood pressure readings, and certainly I didn't get ant readings in the much wanted lovely and low, dark green zone. However all were in the light green zone, and my new target is in the middle of it, 7.5mmol/l. The Contour meter, albeit on a second reading using fresh blood, was 7.6mmol/l, and only just over my target. The GlucoRX meter was a bit higher, but still very good with an reading of 7.7mmol/l. The Sinocare meter still seems to be behaving itself with a reading of 7.8mmol/l. The average of all three is an excellent 7.7mmol/l.

  My blood pressure is also pretty good this morning. On my first and only reading it said 101/43. One thing I really must try to remember is to take my evening reading tomorrow. I seemed to have forgotten to do it that last couple of evening, although I think I did take a reading yesterday evening, but evidently, if I did, I never entered it into my spreadsheet.

  Today, if I have my dates correct, Jodie is back from Finland, and we can have another beer tasting session this afternoon. Maybe Michael will join us too.  The only other thing I will probably do today is to pop along to the little supermarket on Catford Bridge, and buy a few of their delicious apples. I might get a couple of oranges too. With luck they may have new stocks of sugar free biscuits as well.

  One thing I forgot to mention yesterday is that it seems my neighbours are back from a holiday. Over the last couple of days their central heating has warmed my front and dining rooms, plus the back bedroom and probably my bedroom, up to currently around 20° C. They had gone as low as 17° C. It is a nice bit of free heat !