Against all expectation we are having a sunny spell as I type this. No sunshine at all if forecast for today, and so it will be interesting to see if this sunny spells, or more sunny spells continue for long. All my thermometers agree the current temperature is 9° C, and that is not supposed to happen until 11pm. It is supposed to be a very flat 7° C until the temperature starts to rise at 10pm. At this rate it may, or may not start to rain at 4pm ! Tomorrow may start at 8° C, but is will slowly fall down to 2° C by midnight. During that time there may be a sunny spells, and there may be a shower, but most of all it will be cold !

  Yesterday was another day where very little happened. There were more sunny spells than expected/forecast, and that should have been a lure to go out to stretch my legs, but it was also nice to lay on my bed, with the sunshine coming through the windows, being lazy at a professional level !

  Actually the day was not all lazy. As usual it started with breakfast of instant noodles, followed by writing yesterday's electronic diary (what you are reading now), and then I laid down to rest, read my book, and maybe I might have let my eyes close for a bit. By then there were some very nice (when experienced indoors, behind glass) sunny spells. Laying there with warm sunshine on my felt great.

  I did have thoughts about putting some outdoor clothes on, and a thick coat, and taking a walk in the sunshine, but I hadn't had a shower at that time, I didn't want to face the great unwashed public as an unwashed person myself. At least that is my excuse for being very lazy. Except I wasn't going to be lazy all day. Before I had some lunch I put the last 3 items in my laundry basket in to soak.

  My lunch was two wholemeal baps. One had nothing more than a thick spreading of Roule in it. That was fairly tasty. The other was a bit more tasty, and filling. I managed to stuff in some sliced red onion, ham, and Cheddar cheese in it. Obviously (!) I had to have a lie down to let that lot digest before doing anything strenuous. I didn't stay lying down for too long, because I had an idea buzzing around in my head.

  That idea was about Barley Wine - a very strong, aged beer. I already have a few bottles from two different breweries here, and both are very, very nice. I am sure the beer order I placed on Saturday also included a couple of bottles from a different brewery. I was wondering what other Barley Wines might be easy to order on line. Many of the beer distributors I have used in the past don't seem to offer more than one make, if indeed any at all.

  It was time to go to the source, and in this case that turned out to be the Chiltern Brewery. They have a barley wine called  Bodger’s Barley Wine, and it is 8.4% - and so not extremely high. They also make an oatmeal stout, and some of those are very nice, and this one needs trying. Lastly they were selling a box of "12 Beers of Christmas". That probably includes both the other beers, and maybe other special beers. They offered free delivery for orders over £50, and I comfortably exceeded that !

  Finally it was time to get back to the laundry I had left in soak. It was two pairs of lounge pants, and a single pair of underpants. The lounge pants need a fair bit of wringing out, and I was starting to get slightly tired, and also worried about hurting my delicate chest with all it's scar tissue and (possibly) wonky ribs (also a legacy of when my chest was opened right up for my quad heart bypass operation in 2013). Nevertheless, as tempting as it was to have a break, I carried on and did all the rinses and wringing out, and hung them all up the small clothes horse in the dining room, with a desk fan blowing on them.

  After that I could return to being lazy, and also to have a small snack of two small (25gm) packets of crisps. I was also going to have some fruit, but for some reason that idea turned into having two bottles of good ale. One was a pint bottle of Harvey's Old Ale, and the other was a pint bottle of Harvey's Christmas Ale. The latter was described in the small print as a barley wine, but I think it was only 7.5%. It was nice, but not as good as some of the barley wines I have tried this year.

  At a little after 5pm I was searching for maybe something to watch on TV while I had my dinner. I stumbled upon "The Footage Detectives" - a very low budget programme for a low budget TV station, Talking Pictures TV. I don't think it was a programme I would want to watch too often, but it was quite interesting in place, or at least entertaining enough to eat dinner while watching. Dinner was very simple. It was no more than the drumsticks and wings from the erady cooked chicken I bought, heated for a few minutes in the microwave. I really should have had something with it, and some sort of pickles felt like they would be good with it, but I don't really buy pickles these days because most contain too much sugar for my diabetic condition.

   Once I had eaten, and the programme finished, I turned the TV off because there seemed to be nothing on until 9pm when Dave was showing an old edition of Have I Got News For You. I thought I might atch that and then go to bed, but I stayed up to watch an episode of QI that followed it. That finished at 11pm, and I went straight to bed where I ended up reading for another half hour. I still didn't seem to feel sleepy, and it was about midnight before I fell asleep.

  I seemed to sleep quite well last night, or to put it another way I was only awake for long enough to go for a pee until I got up. I did have a selection of dreams, and I can almost remember a bit about some of them, but one in particular was interesting. It seemed like I had invented a medical diagnostic tool, although I didn't know exactly what it would diagnose. It was based on a silicon chip about the size of a playing card. One the chip were thousands of identical bit of electronics.

  In the centre of each one was a photo detector, and it was surrounded by tiny LED light sources that would emit different colours ranging from near infra red, through all the colours of the rainbow, to near ultra violet. It was, in effect a multi spectral camera with inbuilt light sources. Different conditions, and different measurements would be detected or made by illuminating the patients skin with different combination of colours. The curious thing is that I think it could actually work if made, but perhaps only for a few specific uses. If you ever read about such a thing in the future, remember who invented it first.

  This morning, after a pee and poo I was slightly disappointed to see my weigh had not changed at all. I had hoped that I had kept enough control over my eating that I might have possibly lost a few grammes. Of course I would be definitely dissappointed if my weight had gone up. Maybe those two rather rich beers I had were the culprit.

  There was some improvement on my blood glucose measurements this morning - but not much. I did the tests in reverse order this morning to see if that helped, and maybe it did because the Exactive meter actually gave a sane reading for a change. In the same order I record them in my spreadsheet - The Contour meter read 8.0mmol/l, and while just very slightly too high to get in the light green area, that was actually pretty good. The GlucoRX meter read 7.5mmol/l, and that is in the centre of the the light green area*, and spot on my current target. As usual the Exactive meter read the highest of all, but at least 8.8mmol/l is a sort of sane reading.

* The quoted colours are just my own idea to colour code the readings on my spreadsheet so it is easy to see the good from the bad without having to bother to read the actual numbers.

  This morning my blood pressure is in it's typical area. I think I should start colour coding my result on the spreadsheet, but I am unsure where to put the boundaries. If the leaflet that came with my blood pressure meter wasn't so appallingly vague, it might show how it classifies readings into "Optimum", "Normal", "High Normal", "Mild" (Hypertension), "Moderate", or "Severe". This morning it was firmly in the "Optimum" area with a reading of 106/46.

  Now the difficult bit. I have no idea what I will be doing today, although there is one thing it might be prudent to do. That one thing is to go to Tesco again. With two beer deliveries hopefully on their way, it is probably I may have to spent time waiting with baited breath by the front door ! The order I made on Saturday will probably be dealt with, and possibly shipped today. They use a next day delivery courier, and so that order may come tomorrow. I am unsure when the Chiltern Brewery order will be processed, dispatched, and what speed the courier they use will be.

  I hope any delivery will not be on Wednesday while I am out at the The Jolly Farmers pub. If I top up my groceries today that it really won't matter if the deliveries come tomorrow, or any time from Thursday onwards. With very low (5° C or less) temperature forecast for Wednesday to Friday, and that followed by heavy rain, it seems I will not be wanting to go out at all - and maybe not even Wednesday, although I doubt that would keep me from the pub if I put my thickest winter coat on.
  I couldn't think where to show this picture, and so I'm just tacking it on the end. What it shows is bruising, plus some internal blood leakage at the site of where they took the blood samples last Tuesday. Some times there is barely a mark where the needle went in, and that usually coincides with it being almost totally painless. Last Tuesday it was just mildly painful, but not nearly bad enough for an "ouch !". What is very unusual is the red line. At worst, apart from a light bruise, is just a small red dot where the needle went in. I guess my thinned blood leaked from that central area to the red line somehow. I should add, like most blood samples, the needle went in the crook of my elbow.