I'm unsure if the temperature fell lower than 3° C during the hours of darkness, but next doors shed seems to have frost on it. It was 3° C at about 8am, but it seems to be warming up now. I can currently see some streaks of darker cloud, but much of the sky is blue, and some just has some thin, almost transparent cloud. This means we have had almost non stop sunshine for the last hour, but sometimes it does seem weak and watery sunshine. The forecast says sunny spells until midday. From 3pm, and an hour after the temperature should have risen to 9° C, it will probably start to rain. Mostly it should be light rain, and it will finish with drizzle at 7pm. After that the cloud will be getting thin, and the temperature will be dropping again, but it will rise again to 7° C tomorrow morning. Most of tomorrow will be grey, and wet, but the temperature may climb to 12° C.

  Yesterday seemed to be a very busy day (by my standards) until mid afternoon when I could relax with some beers. After I finished writing I had my usual rest, albeit probably a bit shorter than usual, and then I washed my hair and had a shower. By the time I was dried and dressed it was time to turn the new fridge/freezer on.

  I did a little bit more tidying up in the kitchen, and with other stuff, about half an hour passed. I checked the two trays of ice cubes I had put in the freezer, and they were already half frozen. That seemed a good enough test for me, and so I went out shopping in Tesco to buy some stuff to store in the new fridge/freezer. It was cold when I walked to Tesco, but the sun was out, and when the wind dropped it felt like a fairly nice little walk.

  I wanted to be some stuff for immediate use from Tesco, but I also wanted to buy some stuff to go in the freezer section. I bought frozen beef burgers, a bag of oven chips, and I think that was all. I had intended to but stuff like frozen peas and mixed vegetables, but my shopping basket seemed to be filling up too fast. I did buy some ready chopped iceberg lettuce, and some salad tomatoes to store in the "crisper" drawer.

  On my old fridge freezer the vegetable and salad box was basically at floor level, and so I don't think I ever used it. On the new fridge/freezer it is about stomach height, and so I will use it, and that makes the extra space of the new fridge freezer even more extra roomy. I expect the day will come when I have filled the fridge full up....or maybe not, but for mow it seems the height of luxury to have so much storage space, and the important bit, the larder section, is at good height to make it easy to use efficiently.

  I knew I could easily be tempted to buy something completely unhealthy while in Tesco, and so I took the guesswork out of it, and bought two mini sub rolls - which are known to be full of everything I probably shouldn't eat. The sad fact is that they seem like they are really tasty, but somehow they aren't. Maybe it is that the first bite or two taste good, and then you want some sort of variety which isn't there. Alternately, maybe it is just guilt that spoils the flavour, and that also includes the price - I think I could make something very similar from raw ingredients for maybe half the price.

  Once I had put all my shopping away, and had my naughty lunch, I was thinking I could be super lazy for a few hours, but I kept interrupting my rest to do little jobs, and one bigger job. The bigger job was to hoover the dining room to pick up all the bits of expanded polystyrene and bits of cardboard after cutting up the box the freezer came in. It did look a bit nicer in there after my work, although the carpet in there is well past it's finest years.

  At about 3.30pm I got a voice call from Jodie to say she was going in Aldi first. That is quite a walk from the station (assuming she had come to Catford on the train as usual), but I got the feeling she regarded it as just a casual walk. Even in the great years when I was doing 5,6, and even occasional nearly 7 mile walks, I would have regarded the station to Aldi as being very tedious.

  I think Jodie managed to arrive here just before 4pm. She didn't seem to be in much of a drinking mood - suggesting she probably had a skinful the previous night. Her drinking was quite slow, and I think I had one extra top up before Michael arrived. He was in a medium mood, but still wondering out loud if he would die before his wife, and maybe next year. He is still running around like a blue-arsed fly doing loads of stuff that I would assume the £800 a month care home should be doing - stuff like laundry. Michael is washing all his wife's bedding and clothing, and also bringing in all her meals.

  After a while I somehow got Michael arguing about music, and that is back to normal. It sometimes seems that Michael's only interest in life is music, and he worships Spotify for bringing him more and more music. I mean music is good, but that is only the case for good music, and not any old riffraff. It feels good to me that I still get much enjoyment from other stuff - photography when I can, and reading, lot's of reading. (Which reminds me - Jodie brought me a copy of The Metro, and I ought to read it some time to see if anything is happening in the world).

  Jodie left at about her normal time to get a train to Clockhouse where she would meet Alan in The Three Hounds before going off to some other beer establishment. Michael left just in time to miss the start of Star Trek: Voyager, and once he was gone I made my dinner. It was a bit bigger than ideal, but I was using some stuff up that I had had for nearly a week. I made up what should have been two delicious baps.

  Those baps were filled with mustard, thick cut ham, sliced tomato, and some iceberg lettuce. With hindsight I think they would have been nicer if I had put the ham in the microwave for 30 seconds to get it up to blood temperature. I used it straight from the fridge, and it seemed a bit tasteless. It seemed that the strongest taste was actually the wholemeal baps. They should have been enough for dinner, but....

  I had a tomato and broccoli qiche that was a week old. Some of time I kept it in the big beer fridge, and so it was still sort of fresh. I cooked it in the mini oven/grill for the prescribed time before eating it. I can't help feeling that some foods are best eaten cold - particularly pork pies. Maybe the texture is better when cold. That quiche was not horrible, but it was very unexciting, and sort of sloppy after cooking and eaten hot.

  Fast forwarding to bedtime.... After my extra early morning, I felt I should have an early night, and by 9pm I had read enough in bed to turn the light out to try for sleep. The only problem is that stuffing that quiche down on top of the two ham baps, left me with mild indigestion. It was not the terrible acid indigestion and heartburn, but maybe only a notch down from those - a sort of ache rather than a pain. No matter, it was still enough to keep me from relaxing enough for sleep. It was more like 11pm than 9pm before I got to sleep.

  I think that once asleep I seemed to sleep OK. I am not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing, but I do remember having loads of seemingly very short, almost meaningless dreams. It was almost like I couldn't seem to be able to concentrate on having a good dream. One possible reason is that my body seemed to know what my mind didn't know - that I was brewing up a massive poo !

  I guess that somehow I didn't seem to get a chance to have a good poo yesterday. The sad thing is that even after what turned out to be two visits to the toilet in quick succession, and seeming to have passed plenty of pee, my weight was actually 400gm heavier than normal. It may not have helped that on top of some bad eating I also had some beers that were quite malty - and malt is a sugar, and contains a lot of energy.

  The beer and food really affected my blood glucose measurements this morning. The Contour meter read 9.7mmol/l, and that is about as high as you can get without crossing the red line, but is still dangerous if at this level for too long. The GlucoeRX meter was a bit better at 9.2mmol/l. The Sinocare meter was definitely in the danger zone with a reading of 10.2mmol/l (readings starting with a ten are colour coded blood red in my spreadsheet of results).

  Even my blood pressure is up a tiny bit thinking about those dreadful blood glucose readings. It could also be said to be down a bit compared to the last few days. It is still diagnosed as "Optimum" by the meter. The Systolic pressure was 111mmHg, and my typical average figure is 106mmHg, except for this month when it seems to be 110mmHg. The diastolic pressure was 41mmHg, and that is below the average for every single month this year. It is probably a good thing. My pulse rate was 53 bpm, and that seems to be about my baseline when relaxed.

  I guess today is going to have to include some fasting. Maybe not eating until dinner time, and then try and make dinner as safe as possible. That could be tricky because one of two things I think I might do today is to go shopping in Aldi. Mostly it will be to buy more frozen food, maybe mostly vegetable, but also some ready meals to store in the new freezer. I very much expect there could be a few things I shouldn't really buy, but will be unable to resist.

  I could put off going to Aldi today, but I do have a general plan to buys lots of food soon before all the supermarkets fill to crush loading as people buy 6 weeks of supplies because the supermarkets may be closed for a single day (maybe two) over Xmas. The other thing I may do, but could easily put off, is to do a bit of laundry. Mostly I will probably just be very lazy, doing stuff like laying on my bed reading and if the desire take me, snoozing too.