Today looks like it will be a very murky day. It is certainly wet as I write this, and the rain, and then drizzle (maybe) may only take a break for a couple of hours from midday. It may be dry from 5pm onwards. The temperature may peak as high as 12° C today. Tomorrow should be dry, but with a high of just 7° C, and that for maybe only 2 hours, it will feel very chilly. There may be sunny spells at 9am and 3pm, but otherwise it will be possibly light grey all day.

  I guess yesterday should be classified as a good day. I think I achieved all I intended to do, although I didn't manage the fast I said I ought to do until dinner time. Despite temptations I did half manage to control what I ate, and how much, and that part achieved what I hoped for.

  I didn't feel in a rush to do anything yesterday morning. All I hoped to do was not terribly important, or at least it didn't seem so at the time. After I finished writing, it wasn't until just gone midday when I had a shower. At the end of the shower I put some laundry in to soak. It seemed like quite a lot, but I miscounted the t-shirts - one instead of the two I thought I would be washing !

  Once I was dry and dressed, I slowly got myself together to go shopping again. Yesterday I shopped in Aldi, and it seemed very busy in there. I had hoped it would be a bit quieter, but I guess the pre-Xmas panic has already started. It did seem that most of the customers were women with one or more toddlers in tow. I think one woman had 3 or 4, and probably belonged to one of those strange religions where they are urged to breed faster than the native population - a slow, but peaceful way of conquering a country. I am so glad I will not be around in 50 years time when the skyline may be all mosques.

  A big part of my mission in Aldi was to stock up on frozen foods to fill up the new, and bigger freezer. As well as some basics like frozen vegetables, it included things like fish fingers, and even ice cream. The latter almost came about by accident. I noticed they had a new range of 500ml pots of "posh" ice creams, and I was curious as to what their sugar contents were like. The answer can be summed up as horrendous. I found that a basic one litre tub of plain vanilla ice cream had less than half the sugar content, and so I bought one of those too.

  Although most of my walk to Aldi was on the shaded side of the road, it was quite pleasant with a lot of blue sky above, and the houses on the other side of the road partly lit up by bright sunshine (but I don't think the sun was high enough to reach ground level on that side of the road - or I would have been walking in it). I found myself walking faster than expecting, and it was only as I arrived at Aldi that I felt the need to slow down.

  The walk home involved carrying a lot of shopping, and I was definitely feeling the strain when I arrived at my front door, although having said that, I think I could have walked for a few more minutes before getting any serious pains. It is almost like my angina has gone away, and I am now left with slightly weak legs, and a tendency to getting slightly short of breath when walking too far.

  It felt good to get home, and it felt good to put so much into the freezer section, and some in the larder section of my new fridge freezer. Most of what I bought was not for eating and drinking yesterday, but I did buy a couple of little things that I had for lunch. One was a reduced price sausage roll type thing, but I think it was more like a cheese and onion roll, although I don't recall the label saying that explicitly. It was nice-ish, but a bit disappointing. The other thing was a small pack of tiny little lozenges of some sort of soft/cream cheese topped with "Mediterranean toppings". They were sort of nice, but too insubstantial, and with only two flavours.

   That little lunch was fairly low in sugars, but probably had had deadly levels of cholesterols in it. As usual, I had a little lay down after lunch (and of course after the walk to and from Aldi). I couldn't completely relax because I new that sooner or later I would have to get back to the laundry I had left soaking. I think it was around 3pm when I finally got back to it. With most of it being underpants, it was not a very heavy job to do the three rinses and then fabric conditioner.

  I hung it all on the big clothes horse in the dining room, and because it was late, I put the fan heater on full blast for the first hour or two. After that I turned the heater down to low, and shortly before I turned the lights out, and closed up downstairs, thinking I would be in bed soon, I replaced the fan heater with the desk fan that I left on all night.

  There were actually two more jobs I did yesterday, and one was fairly important. The important one was to fully pay off my two credit cards. The one with the new fridge freezer on it looked to be very high, but I think it was the usual thing of me paying what I saw rather than what the actual statement demanded. I am quite possibly very much in credit now, and in a few days I will check that.

  The other job was to check and fully charge the battery in my other, very rarely used, laptop. That one still had something like an hour of life (estimated) in the battery. I put it on charge, and while charging I did the 154 (or something like that) updates that had accumulated since I last used it. The updates, were one that needed a restart because it included a new Linux kernel, but it only took 10 to 15 minutes to bring it fully up to date, and then a bit longer to reach 100% battery charge.

  By the time all that was done it was dinnertime. I had had a snack a bit earlier, but it was a sort of healthy big apple and a Persimmon fruit with a small chink of cheese. My dinner was two haddock fish cakes. Apart from eating them mwhen they were rather too hot inside, they were nice - and they had an Aldi 30% off sticker on them - they were on their sell by date. I also bought a pack of cod fishcakes that were similarly discounted, and I look forward to them today. I also had a little pack of "rollitos" (cheese with some sort of "continental" sausage wrapped around it).

  I had hoped, and it turned out to be the case, that not eating something bigger, and spicier, would not bring about any acid indigestion or heartburn last night. Unfortunately there were other reasons why it was extremely late before I managed to get to sleep last night (or should I say this morning !). After watching Star Trek: Voyager, and with hindsight I am not sure why I bothered, I turned the TV off and headed to bed to read. At that time it was only just after 8pm.

  Before I got in or on my bed I sent a rare unsolicited message to Angela. It was about a gig that I would like to go to on the 28th December. The band playing is MT Pockets, and both I and Angela like them. My theory is that the pub will be fairly quiet at this between Xmas and New Years date. It is in The Partridge pub in Bromley, and that can get uncomfortably packed when popular bands play there. I am hoping it will be a more sane night.

  I told Angela about it, and how there was a small chance that Michael would go (probably a very tiny chance), and that even I was 50-50 about going, although I would like to. I said that I expected Angela to instantly dismiss the idea, but I suggested she almost ignore it for now, but let the idea simmer in the back of her brain until the day before making up her mind.

  I was very surprised to get a reply quite quickly. Angela did confirm that her initial thought was that she could not go in her current position (still in pain from her cancer treatment, and very anxious about whether the treatment really had cured her, or would she have to go through it again). However she did say that at other times she would be very interested. Then a few sentences later she wrote that she would do her best if I confirmed I was definitely going. It seems I have sort of painted myself into a corner. What was once a "I would like to go" is now a "I have to go".

  I sent one more message to Angela, and it was a sort of subtle hint as a possible way to think about her anxiety. I get the impression it is consuming her, and she needs a way to break it. I did wonder if it would annoy more than help her (but even annoyance would be good if it motivated her in a better direction). I guess I was sort of thrilled when the simple reply I got back said simply "thank you Bill xxxxxxx".

  Thinking about that little success (or so I hoped) was one reason for my brain being too active for sleep, but at that time I was not actually trying for sleep. I had intended to read a short chapter or two of the book I am currently reading "The Turing Option" by Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky. It's story includes romance, multiple murder and explosions, and SciFi (although this is one bit of SciFi that is slowly becoming reality - maybe in the next 10 to 30 years).

  It all meant that when I turned the light out at just gone 9pm, my brain was far too active to let me relax into sleep. The harder I tried to relax the more my bed started to feel uncomfortable. One good thing, although useless for last night, was that I seemed to be just as uncomfortable turning on to my "wrong" side. It made a nice change to not have that start off some indigestion problems.

  Maybe I was almost getting to relax enough when the sole of my right foot began to itch. I am not sure that "itch" is an adequate description, but it is good enough for now. I have suffered from this before, quite a few times, but not for many months now. It is not exactly painful, but it is really distracting, and I can't concentrate on anything else. It does not respond to scratching, and anyway, it is not easy to scratch the bottom of the foot.

  After a while I considered the only thing to do was to get up, turn the heater on full, and read stuff on my PC. The "itch" was lessened by having some weight on my foot, and reading stuff on the internet was a good distraction. Maybe it was too good because once again my brain started whirring, and I couldn't stop it. I am not sure when it was that I was able to get back into bed, and finally fall asleep, but I am sure it was well after midnight. So much for an early night !

  I partly made up for the missed sleep by sleeping through to 7.40am this morning. Once I had got to sleep I seemed to sleep OK, and although I had to get up to pee the usual times in the night, I had no problem getting back to sleep again. I had a selection of dreams, but they were either too complex to attempt to describe them, or just too fragmented in my memory.

  I felt fairly OK-ish when I got up, but I was disappointed that when I thought I was going to have a poo, it was just wind. Maybe that poo will come later (often near midday for some unknown, but very annoying reason). I did have a reasonable pee, and after that I got on the scales and found I had managed to lose 300gm since yesterday morning. Once again I thought "if only I could do the same every morning...." but it just seems to be swings and roundabouts at this time of the year.

  One good thing is that I seem to have just about managed to get my blood glucose under control again - although the results are far from world shattering. The Contour meter read 8.8mmol/l - sort of the high side of a bland "OK". The GlucoRX meter read a far better 8.1mmol/l, and that is rather good. The Sinocare meter read 8.9mmol/l, and that is uncomfortably close to the light pink zone - the first medium importance warning area.

  There was even better news about my blood pressure this morning. Maybe I just caught it at a good time, but 102/47 is even a tiny bit better than my averages for previous months. Even my pulse rate was looking as if I was nice and relaxed. It was a very typical 54 bpm. Actually I am not sure if I am relaxed or just tired.

  My original plan for today was to go to The Jolly Farmers to see if it was time to get a pint of Guinness on the house, and maybe a quick hug from Ayse. It is now just past 11am, and I still have more to do to finish this writing. I am not washed and dressed, and this gloomy weather makes me feel more tired than I really am. I now very much doubt I will experience the pleasure of Th Jolly Farmers. I think I may do some more laundry today, and maybe I might do a bit more hoovering if I come over all irrational or something. Mostly I feel like being very, very lazy as I write these words. In fact it is a struggle to even type these words.....