Once again there seems to be no mist, but the temperature is definitely down to -3° C. As seen on the left, my most pessimistic outdoor thermometer says it is -4.7° C, but I don't think that is correct. Perhaps with no mist we don't have to wait until midday for the sun to break through. In fact it seems to be shining now, but is below the roofline of the houses to the east as I write this. Maybe the extra sunshine, if indeed the sun can stay shining until sunset, will raise the temperature higher than the forecast 1° C. At the end of the afternoon the temperature will fall again, and by 8pm is might be possible that mist will fall, and by midnight the temperature will be down to -2° C. Tomorrow will start very cold again, but there may be some sunny spells in the afternoon, and maybe the temperature may peak at a whole 3° C. From the day after tomorrow the nights may stay above zero.

  My patched patch on my bathtub seemed to mostly hold yesterday, and I was able to wash my hair, and have a shower. I also put some laundry in to soak, but that is still there this morning. Having got clean and shiny (I also had a wet shave) I could have done anything that needed being clean, but I didn't do anything like that.

  What I did do slightly surprised myself.  By 1pm it did seem to be bright and sunny outside, and that gave me the urge to go out and test my new camera lens. It was a good test because it gave me a better idea of when it would be stupid to use it, and when it might be useful. It soon became obvious that it really was useless for long distance shots. having said that, maybe with a more evenly lit day, later in the year when the sun is a lot higher in the sky, it might take some interesting pictures.

  I was still not keen on walking very far in that freezing air, but I put on my extra thick, bright orange (in case I get lost in a snowdrift or something) winter coat, and kept the hood up all the time. That kept me warm enough to end up starting some light sweat under the coat. The coat felt comfortable, but slightly restrictive when carrying a heavy camera bag, and heavy camera. I think the last time I used it I just had a small pocket camera, and that felt fine.

  As can be seen from the trace on the left, my walk was a bit more than just halfway through the park and a quick return.  I ended up walking all the way to Ladywell, and then back again, and I didn't use the shortest route possible. I ended up walking 1.449 miles, but with with frequent stops to take many more pictures than I'll show here, my average speed was only 1.384 mph.

  This was not the first picture taken through my new fisheye lens, but it is the first I have to show. Some earlier picture were completely lost when one of the memory cards in my camera failed. More about that later. This picture is heavily cropped to lose the worst picture distortion, but it still seems to be a picture taken at the top of a hill when it is actually on level ground. If I had squatted down to keep the bench in the exact centre of the picture there would be less distortion once cropped, but I didn't feel comfortable trying to squat down.

  Maybe I will retake this picture in June when I can hopefully go out in just jeans and t-shirt, or maybe even shorts and t-shirt, and squatting down would be much easier. Some nice bright sunshine at that time of year would improve the picture many-fold too.
  It was lucky I had changed back to a normal zoom lens what I took this picture - the very next frame on the camera. Despite the zoom lens (albeit not a high power zoom lens) I had to really crop this picture to get a more close up view of this rat spotted on the river bank. With hindsight I think I brightened the picture more than I needed to, but it was very dim in the riverside vegetation where I spotted the rat...or is it a rat ? I have doubts that it might be a water vole. I may have it the wrong way around, but I think rats have more pointy ears than the rounded ears in this picture.
  I was really pleased with how this picture of a robin turned out. The robin sat there most patiently while I took it's picture, but not patiently enough to fiddle with camera settings. My initial guessed settings seemed to work well, The Robin is in sharp focus, and seems quite bright. The background is nicely out of focus, but the tree it is in is also sharply focussed. This must me the best picture I took yesterday.
  When I reached almost the furthest point of my walk I saw a train pull into Ladywell station, and it being only 15 seconds walk away, I went down the slope to the station where I took this picture of a class 376 train, about to leave towards Hayes (Kent), via Catford Bridge. I could have caught this train and lopped a few tenths of a mile of my walk, but I decided I ought to carry on walking because it was possibly good for me.

  In fact the picture above is the second train picture I took. The first was of a class 707 train, a SouthEastern "City Beam" train that had already left the station, ultimately heading to Charing Cross. It was a nice enough picture, but I thought the one above, showing the station itself, was a better choice.
  With the door open the Good Hope cafe turns into the Goo Hop ! It is a slightly tricky place to photograph because there are several conflicting pointers to getting a straight picture. Maybe I was lining myself up on the path because the building looks skewed in this shot. Incidently, the open door towards the left is the entrance to the ladies toilet. I always find this confusing because when I was a kid, and used to spend hours and hours in the park, that door lead to the gents toilet, and the ladies was around the corner. Now, for reasons unknown, the toilets have swapped genders.
  If there had been more light, and it was falling on the face of this building, this might have been a good picture taken through my new fisheye lens. It is heavily cropped to cut off the most distorted bits of the original picture, and so used here more like just a wide angle lens. It shows the building that nearly all the wards are in of Lewisham Hospital. It did almost as gloomy to my naked eye as it does in this picture.
  I have often referred to "the curly whirly bridge" and this picture may help show how I came to give it the name. On either side there is a spiral ramp to the top that enables prams, wheelchairs, and bicycles to cross the railway with relative ease.

  I was very glad to get home from this walk. Most of it seemed OK, but I was getting very tired towards the end, and it was so nice to get back into the warm, and sort of put me feet up. Initially I didn't because I made some lunch first - two wholemeal rolls with sliced processed chicken and some green salad in them. I didn't eat them straight away because I had a very important task to do first.

  I had taken about a dozen pictures on my walk when suddenly the camera stopped working. The display said memory card error. Fortunately my Nikon D610 has two cards in it, and I was able to keep taking pictures after I had removed the faulty card. It is pictured on the left. I used to think that Integral branded cards were supposed to be good, but I think it is the second one I have had that has failed.

  By failed I don't mean just corrupted. It seems to be dead as a doornail. I have the means to recover pictures from a corrupt card using a Linux command line app called Photorec, but that assumes the card can actually be detected. Trying several card readers they all gave the same result as if there were trying to read a bit of cardboard - no electrical signals at all. I had to give this card the ultimate send off - I tossed it in the bin. I shall avoid Integral cards in future, and mostly stick to San Disk, although the pair I have put in the camera now are two identical cards from Lexar. I hope they are reliable !

  I'll just interupt things here for a real time news flash (as they say). It is just coming up to 10am now, and there is glorious golden sunshine pouring through my bedroom windows, and it feels lovely and warm where it touches my body. It is still -1.5° C outside, but starting to get comfortable in my south facing bedroom. If it can keep this up I could be tempted to go for another walk today.

  My two rolls, adding up the equivalent of about one and a half baps that I have been eating recently, were delicious, and just about gave me the energy to sit down and go through the pictures I had taken (after spending a bit of time trying to get anything off the the dead memory card), and selecting and editing the pictures I have used here today. Once that was done I could finally lie down, and really get the weight off my feet.

  I read for a while, and then fell asleep. I really have no idea how long that snooze lasted, but I know it was 5pm when I woke up, and I had slept through a whole Star Trek episode which I might have watched otherwise. It was also getting close to dinner time, and all the fresh air seemed to give me huge hunger, I did not realise how huge until later.  At about 5.45pm I put my dinner, or the main part of it, in the microwave. While I was in the kitchen I washed a Persimmon fruit, and a Golden Delicious apple. I had that fruit as a starter.
   I had decided to eat some of the ready meals I had stashed away in the freezer of my new and bigger fridge. The picture on the front suggested this Korean style Spicy Chicken Noodles might make a very nice dinner. Of course it looked nothing like the picture on the front, and I am not sure I even noticed any chicken in it as I ate it. It did have a sort of hint that the flavour and spice combination could be good if prepared by a chef with taste buds instead of a robot.
  The alleged Korean style chicken was probably best eaten with some rice, but it didn't come with any. However I did have an alleged Korean style Rice Bowl that I could eat as a sort of pudding. Once again the picture on the front was nothing like the dense and squidgy brown rice porridge that was in the pot. I could see there was more than just rice in the mix, but all the colours were shades of brown.

  The good and the bad were the sugar content of these two ready meals. The Korean style chicken had a horrendous 13gm of sugar in it, but the Korean style rice had a more reasonable 3.8gm in it. Along with the fruit starter it felt like I had eaten quite a lot, and probably blown my sugar allowance out of the window for the day. The idea of following it all with ice cream sounds like the height of insanity, but that is what I did. I ate the last half of the tub of the not very nice salted caramel ice cream - mainly to use it up, and to make room for something nicer in the freezer.

  I watched assorted stuff on TV until 9pm, and then went to bed. I read for a while, but I would be surprised if it was much later than 9.30pm before I was fast asleep. Apart from feeling only just about warm enough under the duvet, I seemed to be comfortable, and I had absolutely no trouble with any indigestion. That meant falling asleep, and staying asleep very easy. By about 10pm I was already dreaming, although I must admit that is a baseless estimate, but good enough for now.

  That dream was not notable for any action. In fact hardly anything happened at all, and it was more like thinking aloud for a few moments. I have no idea of the inspiration, but I was thinking about dried meat, and in particular dried beef. The stuff marketed as Jerky tends to be sugar cured instead of air (or possibly smoked) dried, but there as a shop in Earlsfield which I frequented when I worked in Earlsfield, that had varied dried meats from South Africa, and one was beef. It was expensive, but maybe not as expensive as the tint amounts you get in small packs of beef jerky. Then latter often have little bits of postage stamp sized beef in the packet. The South African stuff was quite a chunk of beef.

  This dream was little more than me thinking what I have written above, plus contemplating what it would be like if it was used for cooking. I assumed it would swell up when in boiling water. The only thing worth mentioning this brief dream for was that there was a part two many hours later. Before that came a few visits ton the toilet for a pee, and another much more complex dream sometime in the early hours of this morning.

  It was a another dream about being at work, but this one was from the days of working in a Telephone exchange. In this dream I had gone out with another man plus my boss to visit another telephone exchange. When we got there the door was open, and I was just going to walk in because they knew me there, but my boss said we must follow protocol, and ring the doorbell so we could announce ourselves to whoever came to the door.

  Eventually someone came to the door and I just said hi, and walked in. I think I probably left the other two behind at the door. I went straight to the main apparatus floor, and asked why they had called us in. I was told it was nothing of official importance, and that it was just something that would interest me. I followed the man and we went down a rather dim staircase that went fairly deep underground. We got to a door, and behind the door was the back of a Bakerloo Line tube train. We got on via the drivers door, and as soon as we were on board, the train started off.

  We seemed to go quite a long way, but it was just a joy ride with no destination of any importance. As far as I can remember, the dream sort of faded out at that point, or maybe I had to wake up and go for a pee. After the pee I was soon asleep again, and I think it was the last bit of sleep before I got up. It was then that my dream about the air dried beef sort of restarted with thoughts about how I might cook it. I thought it might work well in a semi dry stew served with mashed potatoes. Like part one, and also another dream I mentioned a day or two ago, it was like a radio dream - sound but no real pictures, although I sort of remember looking at a piece of dried beef, but didn't even touch it, let alone move it.

  maybe it was getting fresh air during the day, and a good sleep last night, but this morning was one of those semi recently rare mornings when I have just opened my eyes and got up feeling that it was most definitely time to get up. As is routine, I had a pee, and not always routine, didn't have a poo, and then weighed myself. I though I had eaten rather a lot for my dinner, and I was quite surprised to see that I had still managed to lose 500gm.

  I was less surprised to see my blood glucose was up again, but I suppose I was very surprised that it had not gone up through the roof after the fruit, ice cream, and to a lesser extent, the Korean style chicken. The Contour meter read 8.3mmol/l, and that is actually surprisingly good. The GlucoRX meter read more in line with what I expected at 9.2mmol/l. The Sinocare meter read an OK 8.7mmol/l. It feels like I dodged a bullet with two of those readings, but as Meatloaf once sung, "two out of three ain't bad !".

  Even my blood pressure is looking good this morning. On my first attempt (which I admit was a bit better than a second attempt, I got 107/40. The diastolic pressure of 40mmHg does look possibly a little too low, but just thinking about it was enough to increase all but the pulse rate a small amount. The pulse rate was a nice and relaxed 51 bpm.

  Today there is one thing I have to do before anything else (except the usual 20 to 30 minutes rest I have after writing all this). It is to finish the laundry that I left soaking in detergent in the bug builders buckets in the bathtub. It is only one t-shirt, and maybe half a dozen pairs of underpants, but I still don't feel like getting back to it - mainly on account of the detergent will be stone cold and almost slimy this morning. Once I take the plunge it should not take long to get it rinsed and fabric conditioned, and hung up to dry.

  Once that job is out of the way I might possibly put on my thick, hooded, orange, winter coat and go for a short walk. This time I will only take a small pocket camera (probably a Nikon Cybershot S6300). If I do go out I might possibly head towards the River Pool Linear park. I doubt I will make it as far as the bow string bridge for a full 3 mile walk, but it would really feel very good if I did manage that without my legs falling off !

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