It is certainly dull and drizzly this morning, just like the forecast predicts. It may dry up around 9am, but it will probably be very overcast all day long, and once again the temperature will be stuck at 7° C all day long as well. My thermometers currently say it is only 6° C, but I guess that is close enough. The forecast has just been revised to say the drizzle won't stop until 10am now, and the temperature will drop to 6° C at 10pm. Tomorrow is shown as starting at 6° C, but it may rise to 7° C at 11am. It will be very cloudy, and very gloomy from dawn to about 3pm, when it will change to medium grey clouds.

  Yesterday was sort of good, but sometimes that has a downside, and indeed it did, but I'll explain that further down the page. The best bit of the best bits was during the morning, when instead of the dull, cold and miserable weather forecast, the sky was mostly clear, and the sun blazed down. It did little for the temperature outside, but it helped warm my bedrrom up nicely.

  One thing I should have done as early as possible yesterday, was to finish washing the hand towel that I had left in soak the previous day. I didn't do that job until the afternoon. It meant that I couldn't have a shower after I had my usual little rest after writing yesterday's piece. What I did do was to have a quick wipe over with a flannel, and a top up spray of deodorant.

  I thought that was good enough just to go shopping in Aldi. I must admit I surprised myself when walking to Aldi. I didn't actually measure it, but it felt like I was keeping up a good pace as I walked there - particularly when I found myself walking almost next to someone, and increased my pace to overtake him, and add a little distance. When I got to Aldi I didn't seem to be in any pain, although I did feel I had just about reached my limit.

  I really wish we had some warm sunny weather so I could go out and try to push myself to see just how far I can walk with no angina pains, and before my legs start to tire. Sometimes it feels like my legs tiring is the limiting factor now, and it is the result of doings so little exercise. I really must try and correct that....but not on a cold, wet, and very miserable day like today !

  There was probably little that I bought in Aldi that I couldn't have bought in Tesco (even if a few of those things were only similar rather than identical). There were 3 items that I could only get in Aldi, but I didn't know that until I got there. It was three cans of beer which I don't think I have seen before, although Jodie will probably say different. One of them was a marshmallow flavoured stout. It sounded good, and so I bought two cans of it. I did try one yesterday evening, and it wasn't bad, but also not as good as hoped. It only seemed to have a hint of marshmallow, and it seemed a bit weak and watery.

  One notable thing about Aldi was how it was stacked to the ceiling with Xmas stuff - toys and games, decorations, weird tools, and lashings of very high calorie, and incredibly high sugar content foods. On the other hand there were many empty areas of shelves in the basic fruit, vegetables and meats section. It seemed like they might run out of those basic foods before the end of the day, but the Xmas stuff would last until next October !

  Among the stuff I bought there were only two notable things. One was a pack of 5 mini bars of chocolate. It was not milk chocolate, but 85% cocoa solids, dark chocolate. each small bar was reported to contain on,y 3.3gm of sugar, and that is low enough to cope with. Less easy to cope with on several levels was the two packs of sandwiches. They were possibly not the worst I could buy, but I never checked their nutrition panels, and selected them just by ingredients/flavours.

  It seems I mostly seemed to buy light stuff because my two shopping bags did not seem to be very heavy when I walked home. However, my rucksack was extra heavy. I had 4 x 2 litre bottles of Diet Coke in it, plus four cans of beer. That all added up to nearly a 10kg load to carry home. I think I walked home a little slower than going to Aldi, but not by much. Once again I was quite happy to get home, but I reckon I could have gone further if needed.

  Once I got home, and had put away almost all the shopping, I had a taste of one of the little bars of 85% chocolate. It was as expected, almost bitter, but if I had eaten it more slowly, and took the time to savour lots of little nibbles, I would have enjoyed it. It has two things going for it. One is that there is stuff in dark chocolate that can actually be beneficial to controlling blood glucose levels.

  The most interesting article about dark chocolate and diabetes is here - https://www.everydayhealth.com/type-2-diabetes/diet/why-dark-chocolate-one-best-desserts-diabetics/ - and it is good because it also adds that there are positive benefits to heart health as well. This - https://www.diabetes.co.uk/news/2024/dec/what-the-choc-dark-chocolate-could-reduce-type-2-diabetes-risk.html - confirms the first article, and is, as the web address confirms, totally biassed to the diabetes angle.

  The research dates back to 2023, but I was aware of potential benefits, even if it was much lower sugar levels in most dark chocolate, many years ago, but I don't think I was aware of the potential positive effects form regular use. I may now try to have some very high cocoa percentage dark chocolate, in small amounts, most days. It is almost possible that I have seen the good effect already. My lunch was two, probably quite high sugar content, Aldi white bread sandwiches, and I also had other dubious stuff, and yet I seemed not to have very high blood glucose readings this morning.

  After lunch I had a now usual rest, and possibly a snooze to get the food digesting (or something). It must have been 3pm before I got back to the hand towel I was washing and had been soaking since the day before. I didn't bother to wring it out, but just let it drip all the bulk of the soapy water from it before starting from scratch with hot water and fresh detergent. I only swooshed and squeezed it in the detregent for a few minutes before wringing it out, and started a series of rinses - probably 6 or 7 of them. Finally I was satisfied to give it a really strong wringing out before hanging it up to dry on the small clothes horse. I put the fan heater on low, blowing at it for a couple of hours before switching to a desk fan.

  By the time I had the towel hanging up to dry there was maybe less than an hur to go before the first Star Trek of the day, and episode of the original series starting at 5pm. During the first commercial break I started cooking my dinner. It was to be a piece of cod in beer batter, and cooked in the mini oven/grill surrounded by very few oven chips because there was no space for more.

  Those oven chips, actually called grill chips on the bag - which was handy, because that is how I cooked them - were a bit weird. They were not square but thin slices of potato cut with a crinkled cutter. They seemed to need a lot more cooking than the packet suggested, and the first bit of cod and "chips" was not as enjoyable as hoped. Ideally I should have stopped there, but even before I had tasted them, I set another lot cooking, and after tasting the first lot I increased the cooking time, but even another 10 minutes didn't seem quite enough.

  That double helping, although still not including a typical of most chips shops, huge pile of chips was still quite filling, and was probably most unhealthy (this is the danger on the first day of new shopping in the fridge). To try to reduce the effect of the grease, I followed it with a single Golden apple in the hope the acid in the apple might help stop any indigestion later. It is possible that it did help because i only had the merest hint of indigestion when I was trying to go to sleep.

  After Star Trek: The Original Series, I watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was an episode I don't recall seeing before, and that lifted it up a bit. It even had a few good bits on it. I guess I could describe it as one of the better episodes. After that came Star Trek: Voyager, and although not awful, it was pretty crappy like most episodes of that Star Trek version.

  I could have possibly gone to bed at 8pm when the last Star Trek finished, but I felt like it was unlikely I would be able to get to sleep despite starting to think I was feeling tired. I read until 9pm when I turned the TV on again to see an episode of QI. I guess I am just getting very jaded because I didn't fully enjoy that either. I mean it was OK, and maybe I learned something from it, but I would rather have been asleep and dreaming.

  At least if it had been a good dream. I only remember one dream in any detail, although I know I had more. The one dream I remember a fair bit of was set in the TV repair workshop I used to work in, but with one or two important differences. One difference was that there seemed to be a lot more people working there, and I didn't know many of them. With so many people working there the workshop layout was extremely cramped.

  There were two rows of double sides benches down the length of the room, and the space between them was very narrow, There was no practical way of getting a big TV to must benches. Maybe that is why I seemed to work on the end where I could get a big TV to my bench. It must have happened before the dream started, but I remembered in the dream that I had just tried to repair a very old, and very huge Grundig TV.

  Mostly because of it's age I declared it unrepairable, and passed it to the senior engineer for the official write off signature (all part of the insurance service the company offered - the customer would get a heavy discount on a new TV). Unbeknown to me, the senior engineer started to strip some potentially useful bit of the TV, and he brought over two very large, very heavy, transformers of a type never seen in TVs), and suggested I could use them in the illegal radio transmitters I used to build a very long time ago.

  They potentially could be used for that, but first I would have to try and get them home, but before home time came lunch break, and I seemed to have a lot of trouble finding out the time. I had a watch with a big white dial, but it seemed to have very strange numbering. The usual hour numbers were matched up to the minutes, So the big 12 meant 12 minutes past the hour, and that was what the watch was saying - it was 12 minutes past something and I hoped it was 12 minutes past midday, even if that meant I was 12 minutes late for lunch. There were a few more remnants of that dream, but they seemed to have faded too much from my memory to try and write anything that would make any sense.

  I seemed to generally sleep well last night until I was woke at 5.20am by Angela sending a message to me. I didn't really understand the implications of the message because she didn't include any details. It didn't seem to be about her now finished cancer treatment, or about any ongoing pains as she heals from the treatment, and nor did it say anything about the outcome, I don't know how long it will be before she is given the all clear, or recalled for more treatment if it hasn't worked as well as her doctors hoped for.

  What she told me this morning was that all her anxieties were back, and particularly so since he daughter, Miranda, had gone home. I think that Miranda had been going to many of her cancer treatment sessions with her, but they ended the Friday before last. It seems unlikely that Miranda would have stayed since then. Angela then went on to say she hoped to go and stay with Miranda for a few days from tomorrow. In my extremely biassed view it seems like her "wonderful" husband is not giving the sort of support he should do.

  I never got a reply to my couple of replies where I did my best to try and say some positive things, but it was not easy without knowing some more about what was causing the anxieties. One sad thing is that Angela suggested her moaning was losing her friends, and implying that I was still the only one she trusted. It is all a bit of a mystery, and it was almost impossible to resume my sleep after that. I did get some, but I spent more time in bed just trying to think of how I could be of some help. The trouble is that I think I can only help by text message and that ideally they should arrive when Angela is in private. I feel sure that she sent this morning's message when "lover boy husband" was still fast asleep.

  This morning, at least in a physical sense, I do seem to feel as if I am feeling better. I am sure I must have had some sort of bug in the previous few days. The day before yesterday I did a little bit of very occasional coughing, and I was prone to muscular aches if, for instance, I overreached by only a small amount. Yesterday I seemed to have lost any aches, and I only seemed to cough on very rare occasions, but my nose was very often runny - not actually dripping, but occasionally close to it. Cold air definitely took it very close to dripping. This morning I don't have those symptoms, but I don't exactly feel sparkling !

  One problem of getting up a lot nearer to when I would get up in summer time was that I definitely missed out on a having a poo, and probably one more pee before I weighed myself. On top of that, some very unwise eating yesterday, means my weight has shot up by 800gm. A second good pee, and the two large poos I have had since then, may have shaved that off to a gain of maybe 500gm, and even possibly 400gm. That would still not be good, but considering my bad eating, not too terrible.

  Meanwhile, it is just about possible that the small individual bar of 85% dark chocolate may have had a positive effect on my blood glucose (or maybe I should say a negative effect because it may have pulled it downwards). The Contour meter read 8.9mmol/l. That is a bit high, but not terrible, and less that I might have expected. The GlucoRX meter read 8.6mmol/l, and that is very average at the moment. The Sinocare was even better with a reading of 8.5mmol/l, or spot on  what I persist in calling my old target. The new (self set) target is 7.5mmol/l, but I only got a bit close to that less than half the days of last month. In October I hit it (plus or minus 2 or 3)  most days, and since then the magic has worn off.

  Even my blood pressure is still a bit up, but a systolic pressure of 111mmHg is better than yesterday's 115mmHg.  I guess it is such a small difference either way that it is no significance, and anyway, my blood pressure meter still shows it as in the "Optimum" range. If it was a continuing small increase every day or so it might be of some concern, but I shall ignore it and try to concentrate on keeping my blood glucose as low as I can.

  If today was bright and sunny I could try and tempt myself to go out and see if I could manage a walk, such as to Ladywell and back, to stretch my legs, and check my my endurance. I would also hope to increase my endurance -  particularly if some of my difficulty is now lack of practice coming before the angina pains kick in. It is still very dull, rather cold, and still drizzling. I don't think I could enjoy any walk in those conditions.

  I may still go out shopping. There are a few things I would like to get from Savers, although nothing I need desperately yet. I expect I could find a lot of stuff to buy in Poundstretcher if I went in there as well. I think I will have a proper shower before going, or even if I don't go. After showering I may embark on hand washing my favourite small bath towel. It was getting noticeably smelly last time I used it, and today I will be using my second best bath towel. Hopefully I will get the whole job done, and the favourite bath towel clean and hanging up to dry before the afternoon is over.