08:38 BST

  One thing that didn't appear in any forecast I saw, was that we had some light rain at 4am this morning. It was enough to make the road look thoroughly wet. It may have been before 6am when sunny spells started, and the forecast says we should still be having sunny spells. The current one seems to be going on a very long time... I think the temperature dipped several degrees below the quoted starting figure of 19° C. It definitely seemed quite cold in the night prior to 4am, and the start of the rain. Today only 25° C, and so it should be less sweaty and sticky today. There are quite a few times on the forecast where no rain is shown, but several hours carry low chances of rain, and 2pm shows a 20% chance of rain. That is high enough that maybe we will see passing shower. It is certain there will be rain after midday tomorrow, although the morning should be bright with sunny spells. Only 20° C is expected, and that will probably feel quite cool after some the recent highs of 30° C and more.

  I seemed to be almost back to normal yesterday - except for one thing. It was like I was moving in slow motion. Many hours would pass by with no real feeling of passing time. It was a surprise to me that I managed to get everything, including me, ready for a beer tasting session in the afternoon with Jodie.

  Yesterday I wrote one of my shorter pieces. It was 1,661 words. Even that feels like a lot compared to how much I used to write - particularly when I was writing at work while being paid to do other stuff ! Exactly one year ago (subpages/journal/2015/July_2015.html#14) I only wrote 1,325 words. I think that was probably around the average in those days. It is probably only since I retired, and had nothing better to do that I developed verbal diarrhoea.

  The result of my perception of time going slowly was that while I did finish writing a little bit early, I should have finished writing a lot earlier. It would be nice to think that I would have spent more time at the job, and made less typos and spelling errors, but as usual I don't dare eat my own dog food (aka reading my own words !)..... Well actually I sometimes skim a few bit and correct the worst blunders.

  After I finished writing I still had my usual lie down, and I read for half an hour. I think I almost fell asleep, and maybe I did, but I can't be sure. After that rest I should have been ready for action, with a full head of steam, or some such metaphor, but it seem I wasn't. It took a bit of time to get back to the bucket of underpants I was washing. They had soaked in detergent for something silly like 24 hours. Once I got back to them I wrung them out, and got them in the first rinse water.

  After the first rinse I wrung them all out again, and got them into the second rinse water. Once they were hanging up to dry I counted I had washed 10 pairs of underpants, but hanging them up to dry would come later. I found bending over to pluck each pair out of the bucket, to wring it our, was more tiring than a few t-shirts - even if there was more material in, say, 3 -t-shirts. After two lots of wringing out I downed tools and had a rest - and an early lunch.

  Lunch was just sliced Red Leicestershire cheese on rice crackers. With the clock ever advancing I still didn't rush, and I had a rest to let my lunch settle. Then it was back to the laundry, and this time I didn't stop until I had done two more rinses, and then fabric conditioner. I could have dried them on the washing line, but opted to dry them on the big clothes horse in the front room - which was quite warm from the sun we were now getting.

  I finally was able to wash myself. Ideally I should have washed my hair. It was a bit greasy from sweat, but by now I was starting to run out of time. I just had a shower before drying off and putting some clothes on suitable for visitors. On the assumption that Jodie could be here as early as 3pm I rushed to wash and polish the glasses - rinsed but not really washed since Thursday's drinking session.  One thing I had done a bit earlier was to shuffle some of the bottles and cans around in the fridges, and squeeze in some more beers from my recent beer order.

  Jodie actually arrived just after 3.30pm. She seemed in a more talkative frame of mind yesterday. It had been my intention to drink less, and also lower alcohol beers yesterday, but I started with a lager before Jodie even arrived. Some of the beers I had were low to moderate alcohol content, and one was a 10% beer !!! It did feel like I got less drunk than typical, but the only evidence for that was that I managed to resist a food frenzy at the end.

  Jodie left to get a train just before 6pm (she was getting the 6:13pm train). It was then that I could have eaten far too much, but as I say, I was still able to resist doing that. However my choices for dinner were not exactly super healthy. I had two lots of instant noodles - one was from Poundstretcher, and was "Oriental beef flavour" and came in it's own pot/beaker. The other was an Aldi branded Nissin pot noodle - Peking duck flavour.  After the beer they both tasted rather wonderful.

  I think I watched the BBC News Channel while I ate my dinner. It was not an interesting experience - possibly because it seemed to be world news, and that is less interesting than national, or local/London news. There were bits of pieces on other channels that I dipped in and out of, but in the end I think I watched one episode of QI, and one edition of Have I Got News For You. There was a second edition on after, but that did not finish until 11pm, and I was feeling tired.

  I was reading in bed very soon after 10pm, and I maybe managed half a dozen pages (or maybe only 3 pages - I can't remember accurately) before I put the book down and was soon asleep. Last night was a trick night. It seemed to get very cool by the early hours of this morning, but then seemed to warm up again. I went to sleep with the window open, the curtains not fully drawn, and the fan on. By 2 or 3am I had, in staged, closed the window, closed the curtains, and turned the fan off.

  Maybe my sensation of it being hot or cold was affected by two things. One is the usual changes of body temperature in the night, and the other was probably more to do with realising that at around 1am I had quite a hangover. I don't seem to suffer from many hangovers these days, but maybe that is because I somehow manage to sleep through the worst. I did not last night. I was feeling dreadful at around 1am, and I didn't know if I wanted more fresh air or less.

  I think my hangover had faded down to almost nothing by 3am, and that was when I seemed to think I had overdone the fresh air, and allowed my bedroom to get almost cold. A glance at my room thermometers showed that my room was actually quite warm, and it was just me think it was cold. The feeling meant I seemed to sleep very lightly, and I was easily woken by the sound of rain hitting the window at 4am.

  I had two dream that I wanted to recount this morning, but only a little bit of one of them seems to have left any memory. In the dream I seemed to have spent the afternoon with a young girl (where young = mid twenties these days). I think we had been walking around a park. I was escorting her back home when at a certain point she told me to leave her and go away. That was a bit sad because we had been getting on so well.

  The explanation of what was happening was a bit vague, or at least short of one important detail. It seemed that she was effectively "owned" by a very bad man. I had to sort of read between the lines, but it seems that her father was a very strict religious man, and forbid her to associate with anyone who didn't live up to his high (and probably very warped|) ideal, and had been known to get people beaten up if he thought they were getting to close to his daughter. It is very sad that there are people like that in this world, but until people stop believing in sky fairies it will never end.

  I woke up at 5am, and I did not expect to sleep again, but I did, and I know I did because I had another dream. I can't remember if anything happened before the bit I remember, or if anything happened after, although the dream probably ended with me waking up. In the dream I seemed to be visiting someone, probably a friend, at his place of work. His work included repairing satellite phones. he had a phone that he had repaired, It seemed to be long and thin with a long and thin display. He was making a test call, and although it didn't connect, the phone display was showing the cost of the call, and it was going up at around 10p per second ! That was sort of scary, but also fascinating.

  This morning I can probably blame the beer directly for another increase in weight. I seem to have put on 600gm, and that despite some fairly big pees in the last half of my sleep. I can't think of any single thing I ate that could be responsible  for that rise, although I suppose it could be a cumulative thing, but maybe that 10% beer played it's part - but not by making me eat more.

  While my weight was up again, my blood glucose...errr, was not down as I was about to say. It was actually up a tiny bit, but still very good. The Contour meter read 6.9mmol/l, and that was indeed extremely good, but not quite a good as the day before. The GlucoRX meter read 7.2mmol/l, and that was up a little bit compared to yesterday. The Contour Plus meter read 7.6mmol/l, and that was also up a little bit. The average of all three was 7.23 compared to 6.93 yesterday. Today was lower than 2 and 3 days ago, and even those two days were very good compared to most days last month.

  My definite plans for today are very simple. I will be waiting in for the postman. He usually arrived near midday, and and he should have a small packet for me. It will just be two packets of test strips for my Contour blood glucose meter - necessary, but not terribly exciting. If I don't have a shower before he comes I will have a shower after. Then I will go shopping in Tesco. In some ways, tomorrow being a cooler and duller day, would be a better day for shopping, and today, being brighter and warmer, would be a potentially good day for a walk somewhere. Maybe I might end up doing a walk a today, but one reason against it is that it was also be prudent to wash a few t-shirts and a couple of pairs of undepants before I left them build up again.