Today continues this awful cold, dark and wet trend. Today will be even worse. The first half of the day will only be 4° C, and the second half just 3° C. The clouds are forecast to be very dark all day, and it will rain all day as well. Tomorrow may be mostly dry, but it will still be very grey, and and cold. Just 5° C is expected.
 
  I did a few useful things yesterday, but not as much as would have been sort of ideal. I had allocated the second half of the afternoon to beer drinking, but only had a single can of lager (it was a one pint can !). There was little reason to feel happy, and reason to be depressed. I did just a little bit of the latter.

  I started yesterday in the normal way by doing my health measurements, eating breakfast, and then writing what turned out to be 2,041 words about the day before, and some of yesterday morning. Then I had my usual rest to rest my eyes, and rest all the bits of me used when typing. I also read for a while, but I don't think I had a snooze...but I might have done. Who knows ?

  As per my recent electric cost saving measures, I only used the heater in my bedroom on half, and about two hours before I got up I used another fan heater on low to take the chill off the bathroom. That made having a shower more pleasant yesterday morning. Once I was dry and dressed (albeit dressed in slob mode until I thought I needed to be dressed a bit better). I then went down to the kitchen to do some washing up and stuff. On my way I turned the heater on in the dining room.

  With the washing up done, and the kitchen and dining room tidied up, I went back to my bedroom, and rested for a bit, but not long because I wanted to make a start in tidying up the spare bedroom ready for Patricia to stay on Wednesday night. Mostly that meant getting all my camera gear out of the room, and getting everything off the bed. I turned down the sheets and duvet, and I put a small halogen heater on.

  That Halogen heater is pretty useless as a general heater, but being able to select 3 "bars" of 400W each is handy. I put just two on, and left it running for a few hours. It took the worst of the chill off the room. I will do the same today once I have had a shower, and turned the heater off that is warming the bathroom. On Wednesday I will put a proper heater in there, and get the room really toasty to make sure it is warm and dry in there.

  All that tidying up must have unhinged my brain. I thought I had waited until 3pm when I went down to the dining room, and prepared to pour a basic lager to drink while waiting for Jodie to arrive. I was just about to pull the ring pull when I noticed it was still a few minutes to 2pm. The lager went back into the fridge, and I retired to my bedroom to read for an hour. When it really was 3pm I went back down to the dining room, and poured that lager.

  I waited and waited for Jodie. It was almost 4pm when I got a call from her to say she didn't realise the trains were running. She thought there were no trains, but I think she misheard that the trains were being diverted to Cannon Street station instead of Charing Cross. Jodie said she thought it was a bit late to start out then, and besides, she admitted she still had a hangover from a heavy night before. She is not very good company when hungover, and so maybe it was all for the best.

  I shut everything down in the dining room, and retired to my bedroom. It was comfortable warm in there, and I could spend some time reading things off the internet, and from the book I am reading. I had had two baps with ham and mustard for lunch, and although only 4 hours had passed, I felt like a snack in advance of having dinner. Of course this was a bad idea, but I did it anyway.

  My snack was two slices of toast from my now stale loaf of Polish Sourdough bread. Once both sides were browned I put on some Aldi own brand version of Branston Pickle, and some ready sliced cheese, before putting it back under the grill. I have been looking for an excuse to have some of that pickle. I have shunned it, and similar stuff because of it's sugar content, but it seems I can tolerate it in small quantities. It was sort of nice, but not as good as hoped for. Maybe it even spoiled what might have been nicer plain cheese on toast.

  Only an hour passed before I had my dinner. It was a sort of ready meal of spicy pork with a few vegetables in gravy. The vegetables seemed to be there to hinder rather than enhance. The carrot, at least I think it was carrot was ignorable, but the tiny onions were sort of horrible. They would have been more usefully used to make pickled onion. It came in a tough plastic bag in a box, and the box had a 50% off sticker. That made it worthwhile testing it, but I will not be buying another.

  I guess I mostly enjoyed it while watching some episodes of The Simpsons. I finished dinner with some butter biscuits (which claimed "no added sugar"). There were as many as 8 back to back (if you ignore the long breaks between episodes for adverts, promotions, and other utter crap) episodes of The Simpsons on last night, and almost nothing else worth watching. I watched maybe half of them, and recorded all of them. I now have even more episodes to edit out all the adverts and stuff, and to watch some time.

  The last two episodes were claimed as "New" episodes, and I recorded those so I can enjoy them more later. While they recorded I read my book. It is still a lumpy read with some bits very good, and some bits a bit boring, but maybe still needed to explain stuff that happens later. Once the last Simpsons had been recorded I turned off the TV, and then turned out the light. I think I felt asleep fairly quickly, maybe by 9.30pm.

  I can remember just a few things about my sleep. One is that I seemed to have a lot of dreams that seemed enjoyable, but evidently not worth remembering because every detail has escaped. I do know I was back to waking about every two hours for mostly a medium sized pee. Once again at least one of those occasions must have been a dream because it seemed like I had woken up far too soon after the last visit to the toilet, and I then did a rather large pee. I'm sure I must have dreamed the previous pee.

  I finally got up at about 6.30am this morning. I needed a pee, but what I thought was going to be a poo was just wind. Nevertheless I must have peed enough to apparently have lost 400gm in the past 24 hours. Maybe a good poo might have made that 500gm...or more !

  All the peeing during the night suggested that my blood glucose had gone up, and maybe had gone up a lot. Fortunately it had only gone up a bit. The Contour meter read 8.6mmol/l - a tiny bit high, but of no great consequence. The GlucoRX meter read a better 8.2mmol/l. That was actually near good. The Sinocare meter gave the best reading of 7.8mmol/l, and that is just low enough to be colour coded light green in my spreadsheet of readings. It is all OK, but I hope I can do a bit better tomorrow.

  For unknown reasons my blood pressure is unusually low this morning. My usual blood pressure meter said it was just 93/49. That is low, but not very low. I decided to check it with my spare blood pressure meter. The reading was not exactly the same, but fairly close. It said 100/50. My usual blood pressure meter is branded "Salter", a well known and established English brand, although the thing was built in China, and may have even been designed there. The spare is an unbranded Chinese model. It never quite agrees with the other, and neither quite agree with my upper arm blood pressure meter, but all seem to give readings close to each other - and whether slightly up or down seems to be random.

  It is just under three hours since sunrise this morning, and it is so grey outside that it almost feel like it is time for bed again. This does not fill me with enthusiasm and energy.  There is one thing I think I need to do today, and that is to go to Tesco, with buying milk at the top of my list. I will no doubt buy many other things too. One of some may come from the reduced price shelf, and may not be exactly healthy for me, but it is very hard to resist when it is cold, grey and wet.

  I am sure I can raise the enthusiasm to have a shower before I go to Tesco, although a simple wash should be good enough. I am not sure if I can raise the enthusiasm for other stuff that ought to be done today - like a lot of hoovering, and other stuff to make my house look a bit less scummy for when Patricia arrives on Wednesday, and stays overnight. It may be my one chance to see Patricia this year, and so I would like it to leave a good impression. There may be a chance she could be back at a warmer and sunny time of the year, but there are no current plans that I am aware of.