The forecast for today keeps changing. Yesterday's forecast showed today as being very wet and rainy. The Met Office forecast for today shows it being dry, but heavily overcast. The BBC forecast still shows some light rain and drizzle that should be ending about now, and in fact I think it could have stopped an hour ago or more. The latest revision shows heavy cloud until 1pm, and then lighter cloud for the rest of the day. The temperature is falling from 9° C, at the start of this morning, down to just 6° C all afternoon. After sunset the temperature will slowly drop down to 2° C by 4am tomorrow morning. Apart from some morning mist, tomorrow should be completely dry, and it might be very sunny, but also very cold. Just 5° C is forecast for the afternoon.

  Yesterday was another day where I did a couple of important things, and almost nothing else. I can't really describe as a boring day, and I did start a small project out of curiosity. After writing yesterday's edition (edition ?) of this diary, I started the day under the shower.

  I not only washed my body, but washed and conditioned my hair too. I am unsure why I didn't start it all with a wet shave. That would have saved time today when I think I'll be having a wet shave, and definitely a shower. The only problem with the shower and washing my hair is it seems the patch over the crack in my bathtub is leaking again. The mats by the bath definitely had a damp patch in line with where the crack is.

  I rolled back the mats to help dry them out, but it is going to need a better solution to stop that leak. I think the problem is that some of the so called duct tape I have used has a glue that is softened by water, or maybe only hot water. I have some brand new tape that I hope will be more resistant to hot soapy water. I also hope that the strip of rubber, cut from the cuff of an old rubber glove, and glued over the worst bit of the crack is still intact. The whole idea behind it is the rubber should stretch as the bottom of the bathtub moves as I stand on it.

  The only other important thing I did yesterday was to go shopping in Tesco. In theory it should have been a nice walk there in the sunshine, but it wasn't. I seemed to feel like I was lacking in energy, and my ankles seemed to ache a bit. Aching ankles is quite a rare affliction. Luckily, by the time I was heading home, the weight of my shopping caused other aches and pains, and sapped my energy even more.

  I tried to keep most of my purchases from Tesco to be known good stuff, and yet I still found two things on the reduced price shelf that seemed like a good idea to buy. One thing was a 6 pack of mini pork pies. They are sort of bad, but the "potato skins" coated in cheese and ham were a bit on an unknown. I took a chance and bought them. I saw they had new stocks of my favourite small packets of instant noodles, and I bought 6 packs of them, plus other instant noodles.

  The weight of my shopping was almost all due to 4 x 2 litre bottles of Diet Coke. Other stuff like a pack of 6 wholemeal rolls, a 6 pack of crisps, and three small bags of salted peanuts were very light by comparison. Apart from the small tub of ready roasted chicken drumsticks, that just about sums up my shopping.

  If walking to Tesco seemed unusually hard going, walking home seemed even harder. I walked slower than I prefer, and it was very tempting to stop and get my breath back - although it was not my breath that was lacking. It just felt like I was on the home stretch of a 5 mile walk. I really have no idea why it should have been so bad, but it completely put me off going out again in the sunshine, which I had contemplated earlier on, or going out to do a bit of garden clearance/tidying up.

  After getting home, and putting my shopping away, I had some lunch. I guess it ended up as quite a gluttonous lunch. I started eating the mini pork pies, and ended up eating all six of them. I knew that they contained a lot of calories, but I thought their sugar content would be very small. This morning I am thinking I might have go those two ideas the wrong way around.

  After lunch I did take advantage of the nice sunshine, but only in a very lazy way. The sunshine was warming my bedroom up enough for it to be very comfortable without using the heater. I spent a fair time (somewhere between half an hour and three hours) laying on my bed feeling the heat of the sun while reading and snoozing. Eventually that became boring, and I started to embark on a little job/task of just satisfying my curiosity.

  I decided I would hook up the failed 2TB solid state disk to my computer, via a USB adapter, to do some tests. The first thing was to check the SMART diagnostics. I was surprised to see that the diagnostics said the drive was fine. It could be that some of diagnostic data has been "fudged" by the Chinese manufacturer to show that it is perfect, and they use a different data area that only works with their own software.

  The next thing I did was quite a slow process, and it was to use gParted, software to manage, grow, shrink, and make hard disk partitions (and a few other functions). I decided to get rid of the swap partition, and to grow the main Ext4 partition to fill the whole disk. It started OK, but crashed after about 10 or 15 minutes. That left the existing data unreadable. I then erased all the partitions, and made a single Ext4 (Linux filesystem) partition. That seemed to work OK, and I then started the long process to use back up software (Lucky Backup) to make a backup of my home partition. As I write this it has been running for 13 hours, and is 77% of the way through the job.

  Once Lucky Backup had started I had some dinner, and watched a few Star Trek episodes. Dinner was the "potato skins", actually small potatoes sliced in two, and the inner face covered with cheese with ham. They seemed nice at first, but with nothing to break the monotony, they started t lose their appeal. After I had eaten the lot I had a simple dessert of a persimmon and a small apple.

  I think I have got into a very bad habit of late nights and slightly late mornings - maybe the latter not being long enough to make up for lack of sleep at the start of night. I ended up staying up to watch both QI and Have I Got news For You (on Dave), and so I didn't get to bed until 11pm. I read for maybe 15 minutes, but started to feel really tired. In such a state it did not take long to fall asleep once I turned the light out.

  I seem to think I slept unusually well last night. I don't seem to remember waking up to pee as often as usual. There was one time when it took me a bit of time to get back to sleep after a pee. It was about 4am, and by then my bedroom was feeling a bit too cool, and so I turned the heater up full. The temperature this morning was, and still is, about the temperature where it would be handy to have a setting between low and high on my heater.

  After getting up I had both a pee and a poo before weighing myself. Initially it looked like I had put weight on, but 10 or 15 minutes later I went back to the toilet to do more. Now it seemed that I had actually lost a whole 100gm. The big trouble at the moment, and I guess for the whole of this month, all the small losses are equivalent to the occasional small gains. In other words, on average my weight has barely changed all month, and while it is good it hasn't gone up, it is bad that it hasn't gone down, and doubly bad when it seemed I had quite a tight control on my eating last month, and it seems like I might lose a useful bit of weight.

  My idea that I peed less in the night must have been a fantasy because my blood glucose has gone up a bit, and that should have meant more peeing. The Contour meter read a very bad, but not disastrous, 9.4mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter agreed with an even worse 9.7mmol/l. The Exactive meter went completely over the top, as it does 9 out of 10 times, with reading well into the danger zone of 10.5mmol/l. The worst thing is that I am not sure what is responsible for this increase.

  I don't think I ate anything I can easily blame for it, but maybe there is another reason. I still feel the same sort of sluggishness that I felt when walking to and from Tesco yesterday. It could be that I am under the weather, and that tends to make my blood glucose level go up. I am coughing a bit recently. It is a very infrequent dry cough. I also have some muscular aches in my arms. It feels like I pulled a muscle and it has not fully healed. Some same this is a long term side effect of one of the Covid vaccines I had. It is possible that is true.

  One good thing is that I must have checked my blood pressure at exactly the right time. It was about 90 minutes after eating my breakfast of a double small portion of instant noodles. My blood pressure was just 95/41, and I do wonder if that is not a little too low. Last night I had to check it three times before I got a decent figure of 114/49. My first check gave a figure of around 138/55, but I did my best to relax and got it down to a far better level. It sounds cheating, but doctors and nurses, plus the instruction leaflet with the blood pressure meters, all say to make sure you get as relaxed as possible before taking a reading.

  This grey and damp morning I intend to have a wet shave, and a shower before going out. I don't have time to try and patch over the leak in the bathtub, and so it will have to be a very quick shower before too much leaks from the bath (although I think it was doing the laundry the other day that will have caused much of the problem).

  After I am clean, dry and dressed, it is my intention to go out in what ever the weather throws at me, to get the train to Ladywell, picking up two copies of The Metro on the way, and then spend a pleasant lunchtime in The Jolly Farmers pub drinking my (typical) two pints of Guinness while trying to do the crosswords. Incidently, when I read The Metro on Friday (I think) almost all the letters page was about people moaning that the new compiler is a sadist, and how everyone is now struggling to even finish the quick crossword. Most commuters say they could usually finish it on the way to work, and I could usually finish it before finishing a pint of Guinness, but now......arghh !