It is dry, but very dull as I write this. Later on the clouds may be a bit lighter, but still too thick to let any sunshine through. By 10pm rain should start. The temperature is going to be up and down all day, and should range between 9° C, and 11° C.  Tomorrow's forecast seems unlikely, but if true, the day will start with drizzle, very strong winds, and an almost warm 14° C. At 9am the wind should drop to more of a breeze. At 11am the clouds should start to thin enough that from 1pm there could be three hours of sunny spells. Also the temperature will fall to 13° C, and then 12° C. At 5pm there will be drizzle, and that will be followed by light rain. At 7pm the rain will turn heavy for a few hours. Of course, the forecast for tomorrow is just wild speculation, and reality could be very different.

  Yesterday was far more successful than I had imagined it could be. It all got off to a slow start. It was probably getting near midday when I finished writing, and then, after a rest, I washed my hair and had a shower. That made me feel good, and I needed to feel good because I had important work to do.

  That work was all to do with the kitchen and centred around the old fridge/freezer.  I started by moving the indoor recycling bin, and then cleaned up a lot of stuff around where it had been. That included a couple of old seat covers that were partly tucked under a small stack of shelves. It was no surprise to see plenty of evidence left from when I had a family of mice living in the kitchen.

  I removed everything from the top of the old fridge. That included the dozen or more glasses I mentioned yesterday. They were all "reclaimed" by cleaning all the wax residue from the candles that originally were in the glasses. Many were quite nice drinking glasses, and it seemed a shame to tip them in the recycling bin, and I had to remind myself that the only reason they were on top of the fridge because I had no more room to store them anywhere else.

  With everything else removed from the top of the fridge, and the fridge/larder section cleared of everything, I could pul out the fridge to reveal what had accumulated behind in over the last 40 years. It was not as bad as I feared. Mostly it was just dust, and I swept all that up. There was also a drinks can that had somehow wedged itself into the corner of the room where the fridge was.

  It seems a great over-simplification to say that once I had brushed up the dust, the job was done. As a big simplification it was more or less true. I will have to move the fridge even more to brush up some more dust, but it felt a great relief to get to the point where I could take more affirmative action yesterday.

  That affirmative action was to go onto the Argos website, and order my new fridge freezer. The fridge freezer that I wanted was on special offer, but it seems only in certain areas - but not around here. The one I selected was slightly more expensive, but otherwise it was difficult to see the difference between them. One slight catch is that it seems the delivery charge was only set when when a delivery option was selected. I though that the £19.99 was for delivery and disposal of the old fridge, but it seems not.
    My original choice was costed as £269, but as I discovered yesterday, that did not include the delivery cost, and if I had gone for a one hour slot, there would be a £19.99 delivery charge. I opted for delivery between 7am and 6pm, and that was only charged at £6.65. It seems my second choice has not cost a lot more than I was expecting. Anyway, the deed is done, the money paid, and I am expecting delivery on Thursday - possibly as early as 7am, and I'll admit that is a bit of bind (I had better have a shower the night before because I won't have time in the morning).

  With the order made, and paid for I could finally relax again - and I did ! I started with a late lunch of rice crackers and cream cheese. I also had two sticks of Aldi's slightly poor version of Pepperami. I can't seem to recall if it actually happened, but I intended to have a snooze after that lunch. From the way I described it all, it may sound like a good housewife could have done all I did in 10 minutes as if it was nothing at all. Unfortunately I am not a good housewife, and to me it seemed like hard work.

  For my dinner it was time to start using up some of the stuff still in the slowly defrosting freezer. It is no longer cold enough in there to keep stuff frozen solid, but it is still well chilled, and that should delay anything going off for another day yet, maybe two. Last night I used two small bags of sprouts with bacon, maple syrup flavour, and some butter (maybe it was the butter that was flavoured).

  I overcooked the first bag, enough to slightly char the bacon, but the sprouts were fine. I got the cooking time right on the second bag, and maybe it was just about a tiny bit nicer. Two bags may sound like a lot, but that was the entirety of my dinner. Those sprouts would normally serve several people in much small quantities supported my roast meat, carrots, potatoes and stuff like that.

  As yet, those sprouts have not generated the huge amount of "very aromatic" farting as the are supposed to do according to legend. However, something I had eaten earlier was generating some farts that who have brought tears to the eyes of Old Nick himself. I am not sure what caused them, or at least caused them to be so potent.

  I watched TV until 10pm last night (with the traditional one hour break of no TV between 8 and 9pm).  Apart for the aforementioned farts, I was feeling quite good last night. I had no indigestion, and I was feeling mentally good after all my work and ordering the new fridge. There could be further difficulties possible, but it feels like it is all set up for a happy ending now.

  I didn't spend any time reading when I went to bed, and I was probably fast asleep by about 10:15pm. I think it was in the first few hours of sleep that I had a dream that I just about remember enough of to describe. It was about the run of a special heritage steam train. I seemed to have been on it when it arrived at what might have been a railway station very loosely (in the extreme) based upon East Croydon station. I thought I had better get off and go and buy a ticket for the rest of the trip.

  I think the dream skipped over buying the ticket, but obviously some time had passed, because the train had been split into three parts in the sidings. The steam loco was nowhere to be seen at this time. There was only one passenger coach on the train. All other parts were goods wagons. I made my way, across the tracks to the passenger coach, but as I got nearer it seemed to shrink. When I got to it I could barely fit through the door, and I took up most of the space inside that section of the coach. Waking up at that point seemed like a wise decision.

  I guess I woke up the usual every 2 or 3 hours, but sometimes it feels like I woke less than usual - until about 5am when I seemed to have some periods of insomnia, but actually ended up sleeping later than expected. In those last hours of sleep I had one more dream, and it was a dream about being back at work, but work had changed location. My travelling time was such that the manager had provided me a bed in the middle of the workshop.

  The dream actually started with my waking up at work. It seemed to be quite late, but I didn't worry about it. I spent some time yawning and stretching, and then making my bed. I seemed to have slept half dressed, and I guess that sleeping in such a public place it was only to be expected. I could have started to do some work, but I decided I needed a shower first. Going to the showers meant walking almost the entire length of what was a very long room, and then outside to walk up a short hill to the showers.

  The dream seemed to skip over having a shower, and the next bit was going back into the workshop. In the time I had been out a huge new equipment rack had been part installed with a few people still working on it. I knew the name of the equipment (but I can't remember it now), and knew it as a super video multiplexer, storage unit, and special effects computer. It was all to do to add further value to the companies main product of security cameras.

  After walking past that I came to a few contractors installing another couple of racks of unknown equipment. They were at the stage of wiring up all the plugs and sockets that connected it all together. I know that those two lots of new equipment would have actually been inspired by my times working in telephone exchanges. I finally made it back to my bed, and I tidied a few bits up before going to my bench behind it, and turning on my PC. It was about then that the dream faded away.

  I did my usual routine when I got up. First was the usual visit to the toilet. After the farting I did before going to asleep I expected to do a substantial poo, but nothing happened. I still did a substantial pee. When I got on the scales I was pleased to see I was 600gm lighter than the previous morning, and had maybe broken the stagnation of the previous 3 or 4 days when my weight only went up and down about 100gm. Had I had the poo I was expecting, that 600gm could possibly have been increased by at least 200gm. I expect it will happen later.

  The paradox has happened again ! My weight has gone down, and yet my blood glucose level has gone up, but not by much. Just one reading crossed to line into the light pink zone - that being an early warning that the next step would be to cross into the danger zone. Both the Contour and Sinocare meters agreed that my blood glucose was 8.8mmol/l. That is safe, but still a bit higher than ideal. The GlucoRX meter is usually well behaved, but this morning it read 9.0mmol/l. That is not a lot higher than the other two, but just crosses the boundary into the light pink zone (as coloured coded in my personal spreadsheet, but nowhere else).

  Maybe now some of the stress has gone, my blood pressure is a bit lower this morning, although 113/47 is higher than my usual average. It sometimes seems that my blood pressure is often more a measure of my stress levels, or maybe happiness levels, more than actual physical health. Once again that reading is still firmly in the "Optimum" area according to the inbuilt diagnostic of the meter itself.

   It seems that I must be generally healthy. In some ways that could almost be true. I don't feel as bad as many mornings this morning. Despite it being just a matter of a few pounds, or a very low percentage increase, I do feel out of proportion a lot heavier/bulkier than I did for most of last month. The silly thing is that if anything my trousers seem to be detectably looser than some previous thing - and yet my gut bulge seems at the same time to be worse.

  Today may be a bit brighter later, but it is so gloomy right now that I can't imagine doing much today, and probably nothing outdoors. I definitely won't be going out shopping today. I am waiting until Friday before I go out and start buying stuff to fill up the new fridge. In particular I expected to be buying a lot of frozen food. The freezer compartment seems like it could be three times the size of the old one. The old one was just a sort of hole, but the new one has three shelves in it. Of course that does mean the larder section is smaller, but a better layout, and hopefully more room in the door for chilled drinks, means it will probably be more than enough for my needs.

   Back to today, and I can only imagine I will be quite lazy today apart from maybe an occasional burst of energy. I think one such burst will be changing my bed sheets. They haven't been changed for far too long, and a few rough nights means the undersheet is almost hanging off one side. It all needs putting back together straight with clean sheets, pillow cases and duvet cover. I guess I could wash the pillow cases and undersheet, but I think it unlikely today.