The forecast says we should be having sunny spells right now, but it is still miserably grey outside. The temperature now is more like 3° C than the forecast 2° C, and in the small hours it must have been a lot lower judging by the frost on the ars outside, and also on next door's shed roof. All the frost has now melted, and the temperature should be rising. This afternoon should see 5° C, and in my personal opinion, probably more, but that depends on the forecast sunny spells actually happening. Between 5pm and 6pm the forecast says the temperature will suddenly plummet to just 2° C. The Met Office forecast does not show this, and say the temperature will still be 4° C at 11pm. Tomorrow morning will definitely see some rain, and it will continue until midday, but the Met Office say it will be 4° C, while the BBC say it will just 1° C and the light rain may fall as sleet. Both agree the afternoon should be at least 5° C.
 
  Yesterday is difficult to describe in terms of good or bad, or even busy or boring. It was probably a bit of everything. I did do quite a lot of useful stuff, but it was not enjoyable, and in the grand scheme of things it was probably a waste of time. It is even hard to say whether I ate well or not (where well means sort of healthily).

  My morning was definitely slow and lazy, although having said that, I did write 2,689 words yesterday, and so I was not completely lazy. Of course having written all those words I thought I deserved a rest, a nice long rest that may have included a snooze ! It was gone midday when I decided I should do something, and maybe even have another think about going out for some fresh air, and to stretch a muscle or two.

  The first step was to wash my hair and have a shower. There was a greater significance to this beyond just getting clean - which was nice enough. The great thing was that contrary to my expectations, it seems the patch over the crack in my bathtub seemed to hold this time. At the end of my wash, and also an hour later, I checked the carpet where it usually gets wet, and it was bone dry.

  Once I was clean and dry, and dressed, I gave half a thought to the possibility of going out. I considered going shopping, and while there are a few things it would be handy to have, none seemed important enough to go out. I might have still gone for a walk, but I assumed it was horrible and cold out, and so that didn't appeal either. One thing that did appeal was some lunch - which is a shame because I could definitely do with eating less at the moment.

  My lunch was two seeded deli rolls. I had cheese and lettuce in one, and sliced beef and lettuce in the other. Just for a change I added mustard for the beef instead of horseradish. It was OK, but I think I much prefer horseradish. The cheese was the pickled onion flavour cheese I mentioned a day or two ago. I have definitely decided it is not only not as good as hoped for, but is actually not all that nice. I will be glad when I have used the last of it - which might be today.

  It was after lunch that I embarked on a chore, and it was definitely more chore than pleasure, that used up most of the afternoon. It was to edit some TV recordings of The Simpsons that I had recorded on my mini, 10 inch TV. What I had forgotten was that there were some earlier recordings than I remembered, and in the end I think it was 5 episodes that I topped and tailed, and removed the adverts from.

  That very simple video editing still takes quite a lot of time. It feels like it should be really quick, and maybe doing just one episode wouldn't seem to take long, but doing those 5 episodes must have taken at least three hours. Some of it was just waiting for my computer to ender the final cut down to a single mp4 file. It takes about 2 minutes for a 22 minute episode, but it feels a very long 2 minutes. The whole job could be described as lots of little quick things adding up to a lot of things !
  One small break I had was to do some wildlife photography. I've been meaning to get a good picture of one of the ring necked parakeets, that have now invaded the back gardens here, sitting in next door's cherry tree. I opened the spare bedroom window wide, and sat there with my Canon 600D DSLR camera with Sigma 300mm telephoto lens. I guess it took little more than 10 minutes before I got the picture above.

  I got two surprises during this bit of photography. The first was that it seemed to small nice and fresh outside, and it didn't feel cold despite it being only around 7° C.  The second surprise was that despite it being daylight, it was not very bright. I had the camera set for a shutter speed of 1/1000thof a second to reduce blur from camera shake - necessary when using the full 300mm telephoto, and without using a tripod. With the ISO sensitivity set to 1600 the pictures all looked under exposed. On the plus side, the aperture being fully open meant the depth of field was very small, giving the nice blurred background.

  Another short diversion to my video editing work was to try my first experiment of dishing out a fairly accurate 100mg of ice cream. I put a small glass on my kitchen scales, and zeroed the display. I then spooned ice cream into the glass until I came about as close to 100gm as I could (with a lot of fiddling around). I think it was actually closer to 98gm.  I was quite surprised just how much of that ice cream that was. (It was the cheap and slightly nasty Ms Molly's ice cream I pictured yesterday).

   It was more than I would have guessed, and I think it was more than I needed for a small treat.  In future I think I will aim for around 75mg. Even that has a lot of sugar in it, but after my 100gm yesterday, my blood glucose was not too bad this morning. With the less than delicious ice cream (aka reconstituted mild with loads of palm oil and stuff) eaten, and I suppose I did enjoy it, I got back to my video editing.

  With the video editing done it was time to watch some live TV, and to have some dinner. I had also taken a bit of time out during the day to prepare my dinner. It was a simple chicken stew with green finger chillies and cauliflower. I didn't add any thickening to the gravy, and so it was quite a thin stew. It bridge that mysterious gap between very nice and not nice. I guess I would call it just plain old "OK".

   Maybe it was just me, but nearly everything I saw on TV last night was not exactly gripping. I guess it was the best choice between the boredom of nothing, and enduring poor episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager. In fact I could not bother to watch Voyager, and watched a 7pm showing of an old episode of QI instead. By 9pm I felt like I should give up on TV, and go to bed.

  As usual I intended to read in bed before trying for sleep. I have run out of any fiction until I choose something from my book collection. Instead of fiction I went for fact inn the form of Randall Monroe's (of XKCD fame) "What If ?" book one. I have concluded it is not the sort of book to lose yourself in, and is best read a chapter at a time. With most chapters only a couple of pages I did indeed just read one chapter, before putting the book down, and turning out the light.

  One thing I noticed before turning out the light (and I think it was before I got into bed) was that my left foot looked slightly swollen. It looked like water retention to me, and I hoped it would slowly drain away while I was laying down, ans later, sleeping. It did seem to do that - no doubt helped my my now standard pee every hours through the night.

  I almost seemed to have a dreamless night, last night, but I must have had one dream. I seemed to wake up to go for a pee at 2.20am, and then fall asleep again. At 2.08am I woke up needing a pee, and went for one. Of course this was supposed to be after that last one, but the clock said it was before it - which is impossible. One must have been a dream. i wonder how many other times I have got up for a pee are dreams ?

  When I finally got up I went for a pee as usual, and despite being sure I needed a poo, nothing happened. That was a shame on two accounts. I felt very mildly uncomfortable for one thing, and it made it look like I had put on more weight than I should have. Another pee before I had breakfast took me down to only having put on 300gm, and the poo I just had might have dropped that to as little as a gain of just 100gm. Of course any gain at all was not good.

  Despite my weight rising, my blood glucose had dropped a bit. The Contour meter read just 7.8mmol/l, and that is very good. The GlucoRX meter was not so good with a reading of 8.6mmol/l. That is in the slightly grudgingly "OK" area. The Sinocare meter was very slightly better with a reading of 8.5mmol/l. Meanwhile, my blood pressure is very slightly higher at 110/51. The blood pressure meter still diagnoses that as "optimum" or one notch better than "normal".

  To my great surprise we are now getting some sunny spells, but the temperature is still no higher than 5° C, but it should still be rising. It will never get warm, but if there is no wind it may not feel as cold as it could. This is starting to tempt me to go out. I have even got as far as selecting a camera, I have chosen my Canon 1200D camera. It has not had much use for ages now, and it deserves an outing. I have fitted my Tamron 18 to 200mm zoom lens. The Tamron lens I tried using on my Nikon camera seemed useless, but this Canon version seems to be very good, and it covers a great range with 18mm being quite wide angle, and 200mm being a useful amount of zoom.

  I am thinking along the lines of jumping on a few trains, and ideally end up somewhere with different types of trains I see locally. Maybe I might spend some time at Finsbury Park. There are quite a few interesting trains to be seen there, and potentially lots of new train numbers to collect. It all sounds great if I can actually make myself go out and do it. I may still just settle on doing a bit of shopping, and spend more time editing videos again....it would be a potential waste of sunshine though.