Today has started at 12° C, and that could be nice with bright sunshine and no gale force winds, but no sunshine is expected today, and the gale force winds may continue until 11am. Drizzle could start to fall at 10am, and it will get heavier, and from 1pm we may get some very heavy rain. Maybe the rain will stop by 10pm, and by then the temperature will have dropped to 6° C. Tomorrow should be dry with a lot of sunny spells, but the catch is that the temperature will be no warmer than 4° C.

   I guess yesterday was a fair day. I did a few useful things, and I thought I controlled what I was eating quite well, although this morning I have my doubts about it. It took a bit of time until I got around to it, but I had a shower and washed and conditioned my hair.

  After I finished washing me, I put some clothes in to soak in detergent so that later on I could wash and condition them. It turned out to be quite a bit later. Once I was dried and dressed I prepared to go shopping in Aldi. Perhaps top of my shopping list was a 9 pack of toilet paper, but they didn't seem to have any. It is another thing that must be the result of Brexit - poor stock levels in some departments.

   It seems unlikely, but I think I may have done a fairly brisk walk to Aldi, and it seemed to feel OK. One thing is definite, and that is I didn't need to do my coat up because the temperature was around 11, and maybe 12° C. The very first thing I should have bought when I entered Aldi was some sugar free (or no added sugar) biscuits, but I only noticed them when I went to the checkout out when I thought I had finished shopping.
  These "oaty biscuits" are actually labelled as "no added sugar", but are still very low in sugar content....or are they ?
  The information panel on the back says each biscuit only contains 0.1gm of sugar, and only 0.7gm per 100gm. That seems low to me, and yet this morning my blood glucose was rather high again, but there may have been several other possible reasons for that.

  I mentioned that Aldi had a lack of toilet paper. I was mostly referring to the nine packs they usually have stacks of. Maybe it was rationing back at the factory, but they did have small stocks of (never noticed before) six packs. They also had novelty toilet paper. It was made of bamboo, and made great claims on it's sustainability, and eco friendliness. The minor drawback is that it is light brown, and the bigger drawback is that each sheet is a lot smaller than usual toilet paper.

  On the whole, or at least on the food whole, I made a point of trying to buy healthy (where healthy usually = low sugar) stuff. That included some frozen ready meals for some future use. Despite the extra weight to be lugged home, I also bought another 4 cans of soup. One thing I haven't done for a long time was to buy stuff, diced beef and broccoli, to make a nice winter stew. It might be good for after drinking tomorrow afternoon.

  The walk home was definitely slower than the walk to Aldi. I have carried heavier shopping many times before, but yesterday's seemed heavy enough to slow me down. One point of interest is that while in Aldi there had been a non forecast light shower. I only noticed it on a few parked cars, and on the front path to my front door. It probably wasn't until I had got home, and started putting my shopping away that I realised I had bought quite a lot of stuff.

  There were various things I might have had for lunch yesterday. The best thing, in light of my high blood glucose readings in the morning, would have been no lunch at all. However I ended up using up two mini pork pies I had bought from the reduced price shelf in Tesco some days earlier, and they were past their sell by, and possibly eat by date. They seemed fine, but not that enjoyable. I seem to have lost the joy of pork pies. I wonder if it is a long term effect of Covid, or just old age.

  I rested far too much after lunch, and it was almost 4pm before I got back to the washing I had left soaking. Even then I only did half of it at first. I don't think I felt particularly tired. It was more a sort of boredom, and maybe also that I had other things I was thinking of doing - semi important things like making health spreadsheets for 2025, and some other change of year things. I was still putting the finishing touches to my blood pressure and blood glucose spreadsheets this morning.

  I got back to that laundry around 5pm during commercial breaks in Star Trek. I hung it all up to dry on the big clothes horse in the dining room with the fan heater initially on full to help it dry. After that I had what I suppose was a starter before I had my dinner a bit later. It was a single Persimmon fruit, and it was very tasty. The catch may be that those Persimmon fruit do taste quite sweet, and maybe they were part of probably quite a few things that added excess sugar to my diet yesterday.

  The main dish of my dinner was simply four oven grilled Lincolnshire sausages, and nothing more. They were tasty, although I feel sure an extra pinch of sage in each one would have been an improvement.  I followed the sausages with an apple and a Kiwi fruit. A little later I topped off the whole lot with about 6 "no added sugar" Oaty biscuits. Although seemingly low sugar, it was a sensitive time to eat them.

  I watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and it was another tedious episode featuring the ongoing spat between Major Kira and Gul Dukat. Star Trek: Voyager looked like it might be even more tedious, and changed channel to watch an ancient (1966?) Batman episode featuring The Riddler (these were the genuine characters, not the extra dark and weird characters that Hollywood re-invented to piss everybody off).

  I think the Batman episode finished at 7.30pm, and I then spent some time checking and reading stuff on the internet. It was in bed, and trying to sleep at 8.30pm. I laid in bed for over half an hour and finally realised I was just not tired enough to sleep (probably because of several snoozes during the day). I got up again, and did some more stuff preparing for the new year, plus more reading stuff on the internet.

  I went back to bed, after a while, and by 9.30pm I was fast asleep. I slept for a typical 2 hours before waking up again to go and have a pee. With my high blood glucose I was waking for a pee every 2 hours during the night, but I managed to sleep right through midnight without being woken by fireworks or rowdy behaviour by drunken revellers. On a night with one of the highest chances of being disturbed, I seemed to sleep better than usual.

  I know I had a dream worth describing, but I seemed to have forgotten any details now. So moving on...I was up relatively early this morning - maybe around 6.45am. After a pee, but no poo (I wonder why I bothered with the fruit yesterday) I weighed myself, and I am happy to say that I started this year 300gm lighter than I ended last year. Another 400gm and I'll be back aiming for dropping another whole amount of kg and in waters uncharted for a long time !

  As I have already mentioned a lot today, my blood glucose readings were pretty dire this morning. The Contour meter read 9.4mmol/l. The GlucoRX was a bit better with a reading of 9.2mmol/l. The Sinocare meter was worst. It was right on the red line at 10.0mmol/l. The most annoying thing is that I can't pin the blame on any one single thing for these high readings. It was either another case of "death by a thousand cuts" of that my pancreas is now past it's best before date.

  Even my blood pressure was up this morning. The only solace is that the meter still says it is in the best "Optimum" area. it was 113/54. I must admit that I was having a hard time trying to relax what with worrying about my blood glucose, and also worrying about the time - it is getting late and I still have to have a shower before going out for my regular lunchtime Guinness (if they have any) in The Jolly Farmers.
  Apologies for the lousy picture, but I took it using far less light than is acceptable. This was my breakfast this morning. The noodle pots seem to be new, or at least I have never seen them in Aldi before. I have to say they are not very good. The noodles themselves seem very course and quite chewy. It is as if they should have been boiled for a few minutes instead of just having boiling water poured on them. The curry flavour was like most curry flavoured things, pretty horrible. The chicken and mushroom flavour seemed to have some potential, but the nasty noodles outweighed it. Not recommended.