No sunshine today. This morning has started off grey, wet and cold. Most of the day will be just 7° C, but from 1pm it may be dry, and still grey. Tonight could be another very cold night. Tomorrow could start at 4° C, and there may not be a single ray of sunshine to be seen through the whole day. The middle of the afternoon may see 7° C for just 2 hours. No rain is forecast for tomorrow. If the forecast for 2 days time bears any relation to reality we could see another bright sunny day on Sunday.
 
  Yesterday was rather splendid, and sort of enjoyable. The great thing was the pure sunshine. As mentioned above, in my notes about the weather, the sunshine coming through my bedroom windows allowed me to turn off the heater mid morning, and not need it again until about 4pm. My bedroom was lovely and warm then to that sunshine.

  I guess seeing the snowdrops on my way to the pub on Wednesday, and then the bright sunshine, triggered some sort of biological trigger than made me think that it was time to prepare for spring and the mating season.....or something like that. I guess the mating season is a bit of fantasy these days, but there remains a bit of an urge to get fitter, if that is possible now.

  I didn't do much to get fitter yesterday morning. After I finished writing I just lolled about on my bed, thinking how wonderful the hot sunshine was. I did a bit of reading, and I think I only tried to snooze, but failed. It got to a little after midday when I decided I would have a simple shower. Errr.....I now think it was before midday because I seem to remember have lunch just a few minutes before midday. Maybe I had the shower after lunch.

  My lunch was a single bap (the last in the pack of 4) with sliced beef, horseradish, aromatic salad leaves, and a squirt of mayonnaise. Lunch also included a couple of small, 25gm, packets of Hula Hoops. I was tempted, but I didn't touch the last two slices of angel cake from the packet I bought on Wednesday. I had other plans for those - a dessert after my dinner.

  I didn't have a lot to do to get the dining room, and kitchen presentable for a beer tasting session later in the afternoon, and so it was back to maximum laziness - laying on my bed with warm sunshine warming me and the room up, and reading. At 3pm I took my book down to the dining room, and waited for Jodie's arrival. I couldn't wait for Jodie to have my first bottle of beer. It was the last of some assorted ales from the Chiltern Brewery. Many of their beers were not really to my taste, but the last bottle didn't seem so bad. It was like a typical bitter on a pub that needs some drinking before you start to get the taste for it.

  Jodie arrived fairly late - about 3.45pm. I then sent Michael a message because despite being repeatably told it is an open invitation for every Thursday, he won't come unless specifically invited. On this occasion he replied he would not come because he was too unhappy. I assume he has had some sort of extra trouble with his wife who is in a care home because she is suffering from severe dementia.

  With no Michael it was a very low key drinking session. Jodie had very little to say, and spent much of the time scrolling through stuff on her phone. Even the beers we had were a bit sombre - by which I mean rather ordinary strengths, and none of the insane strength beers that I like on these special occasions. A few were a bit nasty, although there was one that I initially did not like, but after I gulped some of it down  I did finally get the flavour. The sad thing is that it seemed the only way to drink it was to gulp it down, and so it did not last long.

  Jodie left at about 8.30pm to meet Alan in The Three Hounds near Clockhouse station. I had nothing more to do except finish the last beer I was drinking, and then clear up the glasses, and turn of the PC down there that we use as a music player. Then I prepared my dinner, not that it needed any preparation apart from washing the fruit I would eat. Although I hardly got drunk earlier, I had drunk enough to desire something like a huge kebab. I wondered how I would fare just eating fruit.
  Yesterday's dinner was two mandarins, a golden delicious apple, and a large persimmon. Like the last two dinners, I found it was strangely satisfying - even on a belly full of beer. Of course I did have a secret weapon. After the fruit I tamped it down with the last two slices of angel cake. It was a nice combination, but there was always the worry about what all that sweet fruit, and the sweet angel cake would do to my blood glucose level.

  I didn't watch too much TV last night. I part watched half of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but it was a lousy episode, and I spent more time reading stuff on the internet. Star Trek: Voyager looked really boring, and I think I found an episode of The Simpsons on another channel, and watched that instead. I think it may have been around 8.30pm when I retired to bed to read for a while.

  One thing I did do was to get up again at 9pm to check on my blood glucose. I only used one meter just to get a rough flavour of it. It read 9.6mmol/l, and that seemed reasonable just a few hours after eating sweet stuff, and I could relax and go back to bed, and this time to turn the light off, and try for sleep. I did indeed manage to fall asleep fairly quickly. What happened next is a bit of a mystery.

  It may have been that I had the heater on low, and had gone to sleep partly uncovered, but I woke up an hour later needing a pee, and feeling absolutely dreadful, and even worse after standing in the cold bathroom. It is hard to describe how I felt. the closest I can get to it was as if every single muscle in my body had gone stiff, and was on the point of going into cramp. That is probably a very inaccurate way of describing it, but it is about the closest I can come up with.

  The first thing I did was to turn the heater up full, and then pull the duvet around me. I still felt a bit cold, and I still felt very uncomfortable. It seemed more comfortable to go and sit at my PC, look at stuff on my PC while taking a couple of Ibuprofen tablets, and also chewing on a couple of antacid tablets. The latter were more a precaution than really needed. I was burping a bit, and could taste the fruit and cake, and I thought it useful to damp that down before it became acid indigestion.

  I think it was a bit before midnight before I went back to bed. I got back into bed and felt uncomfortable, but in a very different way. I had a bit of a wriggle, and adjusted the pillows, and maybe 10 minutes later I was fast asleep. I don't think more than an hour passed before I had to wake up and go for a pee again. After that it was probably every 2 hours - as seems normal these days. I did notice that after an initial "surge" I did seem to pee smaller quantities on later visits to the toilet.

  At this point it would be good to describe at least one of my dreams. I remember having at least one dream that seemed to make me feel very happy, but the silly thing is that I now have no idea why it should make me feel happy. I can seem to remember off bits of dream, but not enough to write any meaningful description. Maybe the happy thing is that Angela, or at least someone who looked a lot like Angela appeared in one dream.

  It was heading towards 8am when I got up (maybe 7.45am), and soon the truth would be revealed. Straight after getting out of bed I went for the first pee of the waking day. There seemed no urgent need to do this, but it has been habit for ages. I had my pee, and it was not a very big one, but I also had a poo, and that was fairly large.

  Then it was time to get on the scales and see what the result of all I had eaten, and all the beer I drank. I had actually put on a bit of weight, but that was compared to yesterday morning. Yesterday morning was a bit of an exception because most of my weight loss was part dehydration after a lot of peeing in the night. Yesterday I had seemed to lose 800gm, and this morning I had seemed to have put on 300gm. That is still 500gm less than the morning before yesterday, and so I count it as an overall loss.

  My blood glucose might have been very high after the beer, fruit and cake, but it was actually very normal. It was not as good as a couple of days ago, but it was better than yesterday morning. The Contour meter read a good 8.3mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter read a slightly better 8.2mmol/l. The Sinocare meter was a very small disappointment with a reading of 8.5mmol/l, but even that was not bad at all. The average of all three was 8.33mmol/ - a bit lower than yesterday's 8.53mmol/l.

  It makes me wonder how much the beer might have affected all my readings. I suspect it had a bit of a bad effect, but very, very far from bad enough to even consider the possibility of going dry. One other good reading this morning was my blood pressure. I may have sort of cheated because I measured it a lot sooner after finishing breakfast, and it always seems lower after eating. this morning it was a very impressive 102/44.

  I would be inclined to try and duplicate yesterday, but without the beer. The trouble is that I feel that today I must cook, and eat some diced beef, with some vegetables for my dinner. What could have been yesterday's dinner, stewed lamb with vegetables I put in the freezer after the meat had cooked, but before I added the vegetables. I don't think I have room in the freezer to do that with the diced beef I am going to stew today. Maybe I can try fruit and cake for dinner tomorrow night.

  Once again, I am unsure what I am going to do today - except for cooking, and eating the diced beef for dinner. It is pretty murky outside, but I may be brave enough, or lucky enough to find a drier hour or so, to go shopping in Aldi. All I really need is some Diet Coke, but I am sure I can lots more to buy, but I think I'll give stuff to make stews a miss so I can continue this crazy, and yet productive idea of having fruit for dinner.....Oh, there is one thing I should do today, and that is make up a new electronic diary page for February.