Today clear skies are forecast, and non stop sunshine for all the daylight hours. I feel sure I saw clouds on the eastern horizon at daybreak, but the sky is looking almost clear now, and the sun is now shining. Sadly it may only raise the temperature from 7° C to 9° C. By 11pm the temperature will be back down to 7° C, the clouds will have thickened, and it will start raining. Overnight rain is the best time for it if it has to rain. By 6am tomorrow the rain will be quite heavy, and it could continue until 10am when the rain will change to light rain until midday. From then on it should be dry, but also rather dull. The end of the heavy rain will also see the temperature start to slowly drop from 9° C to just 4° C by midnight.

  Yesterday seemed to have weather that was nice enough to make me almost happy. I did make use of it in several ways, but none of them involved going out for a walk, or some sort of railway exploration/photography. The first thing I did was to have a shower.

  The chances are that I would have had a shower regardless of the weather because although I am not fairly comfortable with not washing for 24 hours, I very rarely extend that time to two days. I should have washed my hair as well, but I admit I could not be bothered to do that. What I did do after I had finished showering was to get the big buckets out, and leave some laundry soaking in detergent.
  I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the time, but the picture above was taken at 12:27 according to it's file name. I took it after opening the bathroom window to stop things steaming up and getting damp after my shower, and when doing the laundry. There seemed to be hardly any wind, not really any breeze, and although the air smelt fresh, it didn't seem to feel cold. When I took the picture we were still having sunny spells, and I just missed one, but it still looks fairly bright, and all the bits of blue sky look nice.

  I'm just trying to think what I had for lunch, as that was what I did next. Yesterday was a day where I thought I had far better control over what I ate, although that could also have been influenced by the contents of the larder and fridge running out of most of the worst things. I do remember having rice crackers with cheese, and it probably was for lunch. I allowed maybe half an hour for lunch to settle before going back to my laundry.

  It was not a great deal of laundry, and it was all pants ! There was one pair of lounge pants, and 7 or 8 pairs of underpants. Doing the three rinses and then the fabric conditioner wasn't too taxing, although maybe slightly taxing enough to make me think I might split the job in two, but in the end I did it all in one go, and hung it all on the big clothes horse to dry in the dining room - with the window open a bit to let the damp out.
  The picture above was taken just after 2.30pm. All that blue sky was looking really delicious, and the long periods of sunshine, almost continuous for a few hours, was wonderful. I took advantage of it by not going out, but by turning off any heating, and laying on my bed, luxuriating in the warmth as the rays of sunshine through the window was falling directly on my bed.

   I did nothing of value for the rest of the day - except some washing up in the kitchen. Halfway through the afternoon I had a snack, or maybe mini-meal might be used to describe munching through a whole pack of 6 sticks of "Hot Pepperami". That meant I was a bit more careful when dinnertime came around. I had just a single bowl of Scotch Broth soup, and followed that by a small chunk of cheese with a small, and very delicious, well ripened Cox apple, a Persimmon, and a small orange.

  One thing I did in the evening was to finish reading another book. As pictured on the left, it was Star Smashers Of The Galaxy Rangers by Harry Harrison. He wrote some very serious hard science fiction, but he most definitely had a very big non serious streak in him. The book series he is probably most famous for is the Stainless Steel Rat series.

  He also wrote a maybe lesser celebrated series of books about Bill, the Galactic Hero. That was loosely based on his experiences of being in the army, and some of it was probably influenced by recreational drugs.  Star Smashers Of The Galaxy Rangers mashed all those things together, and added every trashy SciFi cliché known to man, and many that weren't, to write a book that is very ludicrous and very readable.

  I was going to say it was a shame to come to the end, but it probably wasn't. Towards the end of it he had used just about every cliché and meme possible, but did manage to pull one more twist out of the hat.  Today I will be reading one of his more conventional SciFi books.

  Last night was another of those nights where I was actually asleep early - mainly on account of not seeing anything I might watch on TV in the listings. It was also one of those nights where I woke up after a couple of hours sleep, and couldn't get back to sleep again for at least an hour. Once I did get back to sleep again I seemed to sleep quite well.

  At about 5am I woke up for my third (at least) pee of the night, and once again it took maybe half an hour to get back to sleep. I turned the heater up full because it was at the annoying temperature where the duvet feels a bit too warm, but it is too cool without it. With the heater on full I started to sleep quite deeply, or so I guess, because I went into what seemed like a deep sleep for another couple of hours.

  I woke up around 7.30am with my bladder filled to almost bursting point. I thought I would have a big poo as well, but nothing happened, and still hasn't. When I weighed myself it seemed like I had neither lost or gained any weight. Before I had any breakfast I had another pee, and although I didn't re-weigh myself, I estimate that it would have taken the scales down by at least 100gm - so maybe I did lose a tiny bit of weight.

  This morning all my blood glucose readings were "good". To get the three meters to even approximately agree is a very rare event when the cheap Chinese Exactive meter is involved. It read 8.7mmol/l, and while not great, that is good enough, and almost a miracle for that meter. The Contour meter read a good 8.2mmol/l, and the GlucoRX meter read a very good 7.7mmol/l. Even my blood pressure had come down again after a brief small peak. It was 108/47.

  I have no idea what I am going to do today. I am torn between going out with my camera, perhaps for a bit of rail exploration, and going shopping in Tesco....or maybe Aldi. I would feel very guilty about wasting another sunny, albeit quite cold day by just going shopping, and yet that is what I suspect I will do. At the moment I am starting to feel constipated, and if nothing shifts in the next hour or so I definitely will not feel like travelling far.