Clear skies in the night meant the temperature dropped to near 0° C, and the day started with a frost. However, the clear sky continues, and today should feature full strength sunshine until sunset. Sadly this will only raise the temperature to a forecast 5° C. The sky will stay clear tonight, and by midnight it will be just 1° C. Tomorrow may actually start at 1° C, and another day of full sunshine may see a high of 6° C in the afternoon - which is still quite cold. The day after tomorrow could even reach 10° C, but there could be some rain or drizzle, and I doubt the forecast for Wednesday is real science, and more like just guess work, but fingers crossed.

  Yesterday was spoiled by the annoyance of constipation. I am happy to say that this morning I have been once already, and may go again soon. The thing with constipation is that it is sometimes justly mildly, and at times forgettably uncomfortable, but the real bother is that you never know when it will be over, and it could happen at an inconvenient time.

  Yesterday's constipation was only very mildly uncomfortable, and at time I wasn't even aware of any discomfort. What I was aware of was that sooner or later, and in reality it was very much later, over 24 hours later, was that it would end, and I did not want to be at a gig, or in the middle of a walk, far from a toilet when it ended. That left one possibility - staying in and doing my best to amuse myself.

  Other than the constipation, my morning was very typical - several hours to write yesterday's electronic diary, and then my usual rest. That rest is usually laying on my bed reading, and sometimes even having a snooze. Yesterday I did speed things up a little bit. I wanted to wash my hair, and have a shower in case I went out. My hope was that I would go all the way to Farnborough to watch Simon Whitestar do a Sunday afternoon gig in Ye Olde Whyte Lyon.

  I achieved my goal of getting lovely and clean, but I never managed to have a poo before (or after my wash). The only other thing I achieved was to note that the patch over the crack in my bathtub was starting to leak too much. That may have been a good thing because later in the day I suddenly realised that what I should do was to repair the bathtub with fibre glass and resin. The tub itself is made of fibre glass, and that is why it probably cracked, but if I can prepare all the surfaces for the resin to stick the glass fibres down, it should make for a more long lasting repair.

  By the time I had dried myself, and blow dry my hair, the sunny spells that the forecast didn't forecast seemed to be getting very frequent. It made the idea of not going out, even for a walk in the park, rather depressing. I needed to find things to do or it would be a very boring day. One of the things to do was to have some lunch. My high blood glucose meant I should be fasting until at least dinner time.

  I was feeling mildly depressed, and in a "I don't care" sort of mood. My lunch was a pack of two ham and cheese slices (puff pastry around the ham and cheese filling).  Maybe it was because in some weird way, those slices not being any better an "OK", I failed to feel very guilty about an obvious bad choice for my dietary needs. On the other hand the packet did claim that had quite a small sugar content.

  I then faced an afternoon, and evening with nothing much to do. That could have been very tedious, but there was one thing I could force myself to do - edit an earlier recording of The Simpsons. It, and in the end all 6 to 8 episodes I edited didn't feel like a useful achievement, and that felt a bit sad at the end of the day. On the other hand I didn't stop editing, and also watching a good 4 or 5 episodes, because I was getting too bored.

  Maybe if I was in a different state of mind I might have been very satisfied with a job well done. I think the problem was that it felt like makeshift sort of work. While I "worked" I had a couple of snacks. One was a very small helping of salted peanuts, but the other was a very rare treat. When Patricia stayed for her one night I bought a pint of milk for her coffees, but that didn't even use a quarter of it. I had at least half the remainder, ice cold from the fridge, with some sugar free (or maybe "no added sugar" oaty biscuits. It was a very nice snack.

  My dinner could have been bigger and/or worse. I started off with a can of fairly low sugar chicken and bacon soup. I followed that with cheese on onion on toast. The toast was the two crusty end pieces of the loaf of Polish, sourdough bread that was fast going dry and stale. Apart from the inconvenient shape It was quite tasty, although I toasted it too long, and the cheese almost seemed to melt away. maybe I should have used thicker slices.

  After dinner I didn't feel like any more video editing, but there were more episodes on The Simpson being shown on TV, and I watched some of them, and recorded all of them for later editing (taking out the nasty adverts, and clipping the crap off the start and end of the programme). I was watching on Channel E4+1, and that extra hour meant I recorded one show I would have missed, but also meant the last show ended at 10pm.

  I went straight to be after that, but I read for about half an hour to relax myself before I tried for sleep. I wanted to try and forget it had been a mostly, or at least, seemingly pointless sort of day. Evidently it worked because I think I fell asleep quickly and easily.  It didn't seem long before I was dreaming, and it was a strange nonsensical dream. It was about adding an extra thing to the plumbing in the house.

  That thing was something like a very large hot water bottle, and it was connected to the pipe feeding hot water upstairs. I am not certain the reason for it, but I think it was as a very weird sort of space heater. One very weird thing was that the work had to be inspected by a man from Virgin Media. He part failed it because it should have had a telephone socket connected to it. It was a complete mystery why a hot water system needed a telephone socket, but he said he couldn't pass it without one. He said it was not big problem, and he would get one of their installers to drop one in for me to connect.

  I have no idea how I connected it, but with that done the whole thing passed inspection - even if the whole thing made absolutely no sense at all ! I think I had later dreams that included something similar. I only remember one tiny bit of another dream, and it was in that dream the large hot water bottle looked identical to the usual rubber hot water bottle, but it was about 3ft wide, and 4ft long. It was also the usual about 2 inches thick.

  One thing about last night was that I didn't seem to pee much. I probably was still waking up every 2 hours, but most time it was hardly from desperation, and most often it was little more than a trickle. There were two conclusions to be drawn from this, and both were part wrong. The first was that my blood glucose would be nice and low, and the other was that I was retaining a lot of water, and I would seem to have put on a lot of weight.

  When I first got up I had just a small pee, and then I weighed myself. I had put on weight, but not much, and a little bit later when I had another small pee, and this morning, a poo as well, I found I had only put on 300gm, and that small increase was not that bad, or at least a lot less than I feared.

  When I checked my blood glucose I found it was less than yesterday, which was good, but still a bit higher than desirable, and so bad. The Contour meter read 8.6mmol/l, or just 0.1 above what was my target for a long time. The GlucoRX meter read 8.2mmol/l, and I guess that is slightly, almost good. The Sinocare was the disappointment. I tried it twice and the best it could offer was 9.1mmol/l. That is not terrible, but getting close to it. It is a shame it spoils what might have been an OK sort of measurement.

  I just had to try and blank my mind when checking my blood pressure. That seemed to work well enough, and this morning my "official" blood pressure is just 108/48. Of course it is now probably much higher since all the thoughts I was trying to forget all came flooding back just after I had finished writing that blood pressure reading in my blood pressure spreadsheet. Those thoughts all stem from last night.

  One quick thing I did last night was to rip off all the duct tape over the patch in my bathtub. It revealed that I almost had it right when I sealed most of the crack by sticking down a length of thin rubber cut from a long cuff rubber glove. The staining I can see suggests the main, and maybe only leak was just beyond the edge of the rubber, and that if I had a long piece to use it may have not leaked at all. What I really wanted was a length of old car inner tube. The trouble is that nearly all cars use tubeless tyres, but worse is that I can't think of any place nearby that changes tyres.

  It was last night that I decided the answer is probably to patch the crack, and to reinforce a few inches either side of it, is to use fibre glass and resin. Today I need to do two things. The first, or it could come second, is to clean away as much of the residue glue around the crack, and to thoroughly degrease, and slightly roughen the surface where I hope to lay down the glass fibre, and resin.

  The other thing is to go out into the bright sunshine, but very cold air, and head for Halfords near one of the ways in to the Linear Park. I hope that Halfords still do glass fibre and resin for those doing doing it yourself car crash repairs. They certainly used to, but I fear times have moved on, and that sort of repair is not done these days. I also hope they have emery paper in several grades for rubbing down the surface of the tub, and ultimately to smooth over the fibre glass and resin.

  While I am so close to the Linear park I want to take at least a short walk in there. I have doubts I will feel good enough to walk all the way to the bow string bridge, and I have even greater doubts I will be able to walk back again if I do go that far. One possible thing is to get a train to Lower Sydenham. It would have the advantage of being very slightly downhill all the way home (it is the way the river flows), and the sun would be on my back, and that would make for better photography. That is all I hope I might do. What I actually do will be revealed tomorrow !