The weather seems to be going backwards again. The clouds are currently thick enough that it could be hours before any sunshine peeps through, and the forecast says it will be mid afternoon before we see any full sunshine. It is currently shown as being a dry day, and that is something. The maximum temperature today could be 19° C, but that may only be for a single hour, and 18° C for just 3 hours this afternoon. I think it could be back to long trousers weather. Tomorrow may feature a lot more sunshine, although it may still be 1pm before we get full sunshine after a morning of sunny spells. It could take the temperature up to 20° C.

  Yesterday was a day that turned out OK after a bad start. That bad start was travel problems, and I'll explain that soon, but my alternative plan was actually quite good, even if it was literally a walk in the park. That produced a few good photos to show today.

  I was getting a bit worried by the weather as I was writing yesterday. It seemed very dull outside, and I was hoping for a nice warm, bright and sunny day. That did happen in the end. Fortunately, by the time I had finished writing, and had my usual short to long rest, it was getting bright outside. The next thing was to plan my journey to Nunhead Cemetery. They were having an open day, and I was hoping to get there to see what it was all about (although I expected I would spend more time in the more secluded areas).

  I knew there were no trains on the Catford Loop Line, from Catford station direct to Nunhead station, but going via Lewisham should have been possible. To get to Lewisham would need a train from Catford Bridge station. The Mid Kent Line, Lewisham to Hayes (Kent) via Catford Bridge was in complete disarray because of trespassers on the line. There were many cancellations and many delays. I could have been patient and I would have eventually got a train, but than I noticed that the change of trains at Lewisham would probably involve a long wait.


  It seemed easier to go for a walk in the park. That was maybe a better idea for testing my new Adidas trainers. I had tested them indoor the previous night, and they seemed OK, but I didn't really know if they would still be comfortable after pounding the pavement for long.  It would be simple while walking through the park to turn around and head back to home the moment I felt any great discomfort.

  Fortunately my feet, in those new Adidas trainers felt more comfortable than with many other of my shoes. It was not complete comfort because there was some pressure on the bent toes of my right foot, but the rest of my feet seemed to be generally happy.

  I did ponder the idea of extending my walk a little beyond Ladywell, and in a very minor way I did, by going around the the St Mary's Therapeutic Garden. If I had gone as far as The Jolly Farmers pub I could have added a whole one tenth of a mile, but just over 1.5 miles seemed good enough. Referring to the map on the left, 1.381 mph seems to be rather slow, although I note that a month or two ago I was only averaging 1.2mph. This time I had three extra excuses for walking so slowly.


 
   My first excuse is that when I came out of my house I saw the postman on the other side of the road, and I usually stop to have a little chat with him. I don't like to hold him up for more than a few minutes, and I guess we chatted for at least two minutes. I didn't pause the tracker, and it would make my walk seem slightly slower - by itself not very much, but there was more to come.
  It is rare to see a blackbird in the park, and maybe because they look a bit drab and are less eye catching, even more rare to see a hen blackbird. It is also very rare to see one perched on a fence posing for it's photo. I did, and maybe still do wonder if I have correctly identified this bird. The only place I tend to see them is in the undergrowth, and the rest of the time I assume they are high up lost in the canopy of leaves at the top of trees.
  Here's one train that was available. It was going the wrong way (towards Hayes, and not Lewisham), but it was in service ! I was quite pleased at how this photo turned out. I wanted to show the destination display saying Hayes, but because those displays are scanned, instead of being static, I had to use a very low shutter speed of just 1/80th of a second (most of the photos I took yesterday were taken at 1/1000th of a second). The train was already moving when I took the picture, and yet there seems to be no motion blur.
  I found I had missed the best of the roses in the St Mary's Therapeutic Garden. The first picture of a rose I took was of a rose that was such a deep red that it was almost black, and the rose showed almost no detail of it's petals. The picture after this one was to be a yellow rose, but that rose bush had just about finished flowering, and the yellow rose looked too tatty to bother with.
   Sometime I think I see things that other miss.I must admit I have never seen this bird box high up on a tree before. The tree is just outside the fence of the Therapeutic Garden, and on the river bank. The writing on it says "Happy 1st birthday precious, Jane Peacock Nash, Fly high little one". The box looks like it has been there at least a year, and maybe more.
  At this point I had walked just over a mile, and my feet still felt OK. Maybe the best thing is that my ankles and legs didn't seem to ache, and although I was starting to tire a bit, I could have still walked quite fast if I had wanted to. I think it is still going to a bit of time before I can say it it with 100% surety, but at the moment I think that maybe it was money well spent when I bought these. I think that when the time comes, and hopefully it will be a long time when I need new trainers I will probably go for another pair of Adidas.
  I was just approaching Michael's house when I bumped into the postman again, and once again I stopped to chat to him when he asked my how my walk had gone. Once again I didn't pause the tracker, and so my average speed dropped a bit. While chatting with the postman I could not see Michael's house because of the big bush outside his neighbours house.

  Three paces later I found Michael outside his house getting ready to bin a broken plastic flower pot in the green recycling bin. I think I startled him when I suddenly appeared and took a picture. I stopped to chat, and once again I did not pause the tracker. I think we chatted for at least 5 minutes. If I assume all my chats added up to about 10 minutes, then I calculate my average speed could have been closer to 1.7mph. That is still not that impressive, but if I had paused the tracker while taking photos (and I took more than I have shown here) it might have raised my average speed up to close to 2mph. That is still not impressive, but maybe fair game for a near 70 year old !

  I didn't feel any great need to take my trainers off when I got home. Apart from some soreness on the middle toes of my right foot, where the toes are bent up in the middle, and so tend to rub, my feet were still generally comfortable. I did take the trainers off, and my outdoor clothes, except for my underpants. I then went for a pee. Once I was back in my bedroom I got on the scales, and that little bit of exercise, plus a bit of sweat under the hot sun, meant my weight was nice and low, Sadly I would not stay that low.

  I seemed to feel good enough that I had no strong desire for any lunch, and I thought I might be able to skip it. I first attended to my camera, putting the battery on charge, and coping the pictures taken to my PC. I had not taken that many  pictures (28 I think) and I thought I might as well do the selection and editing before anything else. Once that had been done I discovered that I no longer fancied skipping lunch.

  I had two Ciabatta rolls with ham, mustard and baby salad leaves. They were very enjoyable. After I had finished eating I had a snooze. I have no idea how long it lasted, but I have a feeling it was not that long. I still had a few things to do before I could have dinner. I wanted to check a few things on the Nikon D610 camera I want to use today if and when I go out. That camera is reportedly very good for shooting video, and it was something I had never tried before.

  The first test was of the audio quality. As expected it sounded a bit boxy. My stereo microphone that can be mounted on the top flash shoe solved the boxy quality, and the manual sound level option should mean it can take high quality audio. The next thing was to experiment with focussing. One failure on some of my cameras is that the focus won't track movement if things change while videoing. I thought I had read that the D610 could do that, but I could not seem to make it. A quick touch on the shutter button does refocus it, and I guess the trick is to refocus it before it has gone to far out of focus. I'll see how it goes if I get out today.

  My dinner was rice and chicken. I had bought a ready cooked half chicken when I was in Tesco, and I gave that a good grilling, with some Harissa paste smeared on half way through for extra flavour. I ate it with half a pack of microwave in the bag golden savoury rice. I can't really say it was all that nice, although bits seemed OK-ish. I followed it with a single apple for dessert.

  I had a desire to have an early night, last night, and I sort of did, although I can't really remember what time it was. At a guess it was not that long after 9pm. I had one very long dream, or so it seemed (I expect it was a string of shorter dreams about the same subject). The subject was inspired by the book I am reading about those men who have walked on the moon. It should have been set in the past, but in at least one dream there was quite a modern computer.

  A lot of the dream seemed more like eavesdropping others conversations. I seemed to take no active part in it. One inventive (because it never happened in reality) thing was that four big newspapers had each sponsored a reporter to undergo basic astronaut training with NASA. The idea being that they could write better reports if the understood what was going on. Two of them did so well that NASA offered them jobs as astronauts if they passed the full training.

  Another part of, or another dream was about (unofficially) receiving telemetry, plus audio and video, from the moon landers.  There was some fear that some of it could be faked, but I think it was me that suggested that if we recorded both the A and B feeds (on different frequencies) and then used a computer to compare them, we could tell if they were genuine because all the headers to the data would be exactly the same (with the same time stamps). Back in the real world there are plenty of reasons why this was not a clever idea !

  I possibly woke less frequently for what seemed quite large amounts of pee, but I consider that I got quite a good sleep last night. I definitely slept about an later than usual, and maybe I got to sleep an hour earlier as well. It is a bit of a shame that I didn't manage any more than passing a lot of wind when I went for a pee when I got up. The scales still said I managed to lose 500gm compared to yesterday morning.

  I am not sure why my blood glucose is still a bit high this morning. I can't recall eating anything with any significant amounts of sugar in it. The Contour meter read 8.8mmol/l. I was hoping it might have been under 8.0mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter read 8.3mmol/l, and while not terribly good, was still not too bad. Of course, with readings like this so far, it was inevitable that the Sinocare meter gave a terrible reading of 9.1mmol/l. I guess it is not a lot higher than the Contour meter, but anything over 9mmol/l seems far too high.

  The plan for today is to get two buses all the way to Ye Olde Whyte Lyon where Jo Woodstock and Susan will be playing as The Sisters Of The Moon between 2 and 4pm. Susan is a fiddle player, and so it is going to be like country music (or something). It is not my most favourite music, but a good opportunity for some daylight photography, and a chance for a bit of practice using my best camera.

  The down side is that it is a long way to go, and the weather is not exactly cheerful at the moment. There is still no sign of the sun yet, and the forecast said we should have been getting sunny spells 2 hours ago. Even if the sun breaks through it will still be long trousers weather with the temperature only reaching 16° C at 1pm when I would hopefully be heading for the bus stop. The other big negative thing is that I have yet to have a poo, and I am feeling a bit constipated. There is no way I am doing a long bus journey feeling like this. Tomorrow I will say what the outcome was !