08:03 GMT

  For some reason I kept thinking it was supposed to rain yesterday, but it was quite sunny, albeit only sunny spells. There were times when the sky looked threatening, but the dark looking clouds only covered maybe half the sky, and soon blew away. It was almost, but not quite, warm with an afternoon temperature of 13° C.
  This morning's weather forecast is not quite right. The drizzle forecast for about now has been and gone, and now we could have full sunshine if the clouds move one notch to the left where there is a huge patch of blue sky. I can see long contrails in dazzling white in that blue sky. The rest of the forecast may be right, or not, but we should be able to expect sunny spells, and maybe one single hour (midday) of full sunshine. From 5pm it will get a bit more cloudy, but by then the sun will have set, and any chance of more sunshine will have passed. The temperature may reach 14° C this afternoon, but by 8pm it will be down to 11° C and it will stick there to beyond midnight. There could be a small chance of rain then. Tomorrow may start with some sunny spells, but much of the day may see light rain. Curiously, the warmest hour may be 11am when it may reach 13° C, but the temperature will be 11 or 12° C for much of the day.

  Yesterday was quite a good day, although as I will soon moan about, there were some bad things about it. The bad things were self inflicted as I will soon explain, and they weren't really that bad in the end.  The big thing yesterday was that I went out for a fair walk.

  After I finished writing yesterday's piece I had my usual rest, although maybe it was shorter than I think I might have intended. After failing to shower the previous day, I was keen to have a good shower, and it did indeed feel good. I didn't bother washing my hair, but I did put in a small hand towel to soak - and of course I sort of forgot about it, and finishing washing it ought to be the first thing I did this morning.

  Having rested and washed I got dressed ready to go out. The weather seemed ideal for a walk in the park - or so I thought. One key feature should have been some light rain. Maybe a much earlier forecast had predicted that, or maybe I dreamed it, but I assumed I would be out in light rain. That would have been good for one special thing. I intended to wear my slightly smell, brand new, correctly sized, leather jacket. I thought walking through rain might help to clean off the sweaty smell it has.

  Still on the assumption it was going to rain I took my two little waterproof cameras with me. They are (or were) waterproof down to 10ft of water - which was a lot more than I needed ! That might have been a good thing if it did rain, but considering that I only expected light rain, I could have taken my Nikon 3200D camera, and I have had no trouble using that even in medium heavy rain (apart from the lens tending to mist up).

  For all the benefits of a true waterproof camera, there is the downside that both my Fuji XP10 and Fuji XP71 camera do not take great pictures. Both have some optical zoom, but it is only about x5. There was one subject in my photos were a lot more zoom would have been good, and also the better exposure control of a DSLR camera. A few, if not all the pictures I took could have benefited from a better camera.

  As mentioned a few paragraphs ago, I was to give my new leather jacket it's first outing. It does fit beautifully, although I mostly had it only zipped at the bottom, and I only did that because I had a lot of difficulty getting the zip started. There was no trouble getting the bottom of the zip to meet, but I found it close to impossible to see what I was doing. It was not because I could not see past the bulge of my belly, although I guess that didn't help. It was more to do with the way the leather seemed to bulge out as I tried to get the bottom of the zip engaged with its other side.

  Having got the zip started while I was at home, I was reluctant to undo it again. I did the whole walk with the zip done slightly up around my waist, and I barely noticed any pressure. When I did have the zip fully up I also did not notice any pressure on my chest - which was a very important thing. What I did notice was how stiff the leather was. It is a heavy grade leather designed, with the addition of some specially padded areas, protect a motor bike rider from falls and the like.
  This picture, like most of them, looks a bit flat because the auto adjustment of the Fuji camera is not ideal - maybe because it is actually optimised for underwater use. There was also the maybe bigger problem that the sun was in the wrong place - off to the right of the picture. It is all very well knowing the rules about shooting with the sun over your shoulder, but I can't move the sun or the object.

  With the extremely bright sky behind, I could not increase the brightness of the picture to make the autumn colours of the trees as vivid as my own eyes could see them. The tree just right of centre looked a deep purple colour to my eye, but the camera makes it look a bit muddy.
  In this picture the sun, if it was actually shining instead of just being a dazzling patch of white cloud, was in the right place to make the light green leaves of the tree in the middle look like they were glowing green against a fairly drab backdrop.
  I have brightened this picture until the sky, and also the corner of the hospital's Riverside building is almost bleached out. It is a shame I could not get it brighter because the tree on the left was looking a nice coppery colour, and the one to the right was quite colourful.
  There was blue sky showing in some parts of the sky, and I was bathed in sunshine for bits of my walk, but for a lot of the time it was lightly overcast, and the light was grey enough to flatten any image.
  From time to time I see what must be homeless people camped in the park. Usually they do it very discretely, behind bushes and tree, often on the river bank. I guess they got fed up with being visited by rats in the night, and this tent probably avoided that. It was pitched right by the eastern side main path into the park, not far from the Ladywell Road entrance. I think the park keepers thought this was taking the piss, and they were just about to remove the tent as I passed by. I can't help thinking that if it were me I would also pitch it a lot further from the dog "waste" bin !
  This picture really deserved being taken on one of my biggest cameras. I haven't seen it for ages, but yesterday saw the return of a heron to the river. It is in the river as it flows behine the St Mary's Therapeutic garden, and I have seen it there before - but not since last autumn. The white feathers on it;s chest and around the neck, are really overexposed when using a simple camera. If I had used a DSLR I would have set it to be slightly under exposed.
  Here's another view of the heron. At least I think it is a heron, but sometime I get herons and egrets mixed up. I do see egrets on the river occasionally, but they are real buggers for getting the exposure right because most of their body has bright white feathers, and even a hint of over exposure just kills any detail in the feathers. They might have a sharp outline, but the body is just a white blob.
  Back in the spring when we had some torrential rainfall, the river was running really deep and fast, and it undermined the river bank as it swirled around after going through the slight constriction of the bridge that connects the park to Lewisham Hospital. The hole it dug out was left covered by a thin sheet of tarmac, and a potential disaster for anyone trying to walk on it.

  It is not easy to see in this picture, but there is a big earthmover on the bank, and I suspect I only just missed it dropping the caison (steel mesh cage filled with rocks) into a prepared slot for it to reinforce the river bank at this point.
  I must have only missed the action by a minute or two - which was annoying. As I watched, with the best view under the bridge from a little up stream, I saw two men appear from the opposite bank to inspect how the caisson had settled onto the riverbed. They were feeling around and under it, and when satisfied they signalled the earth mover to drop what looked like a roll of hessian sacking of mud and weeds, and they tied it at river bed level to the front of the caisson to stop the river scouring out under the caisson (they hope).

  That was the last picture I took on the Fuji XP71 camera before the battery went flat. That camera does seem to eat batteries, and it is a very small battery. I switched to the slightly lesser specc'd Fuji XP10 camer at this point.
  This final picture of the men at work, possibly using some old branches to pin the roll of mud and weeds into place, was taken on the smaller Fuji camera, and it was pushing it to it's limits. The picture looks horribly soft.
  Another very soft looking picture of another tree showing off it's copper coloured autumn leaves. The sun was definitely out for this snap, and you can see some deep shadows. The sun is off to the left of the picture, and I thought this was the better angle to take the picture, but on reflection.....
  I caught this tree with the full sun over my shoulder, and lighting up the copper coloured leaves to best effect, but it still looks a bit of a crappy picture. Maybe it is because of the distance. If it was taken from further away you would not expect to see much detail from the leaves except their colour, but this is close enough to see good detail, and you can't. Not taking a DSLR camera with me was a big mistake.
  Almost home, and I ran into these coppers on horseback. I mostly tend to hear them clip clopping around, but they regularly ride around the local roads, and with the Police station, and stables in Lewisham, they often ride through the park. The horses usually leave a trail behind them !

  I was very close to home for that last picture. Once outside my front door I see that I had walked 1.554 miles, and while not a lot, quite enough for some simple exercise - at least in my opinion. An average speed of just 1.452 was nothing spectacular, but I did forget to pause the tracker when taking some pictures, and maybe the real average speed was a little bit higher.

  I could have walked a bit further, although this walk did need two small sprays of GTN to keep the angina away (although maybe it isn't called angina when caused caused by a faulty heart valve).

  It was still nice to get home, and once there I had no desire to walk any further. One reason was I was looking forward to some lunch. I had two slices of cheese on toast. One had tomato purée under the cheese to make sure it was less healthy. The other had some BBQ relish under the cheese. That has a high sugar content, and is not even that nice. I am not sure why I don't tip that relish down the drain because it adds nothing to anything I use it with. Maybe I have a stupid faith that one day I will find something it enhances.

  I really wanted to lie down and have a snooze after I had my cheese on toast. I did feel very tired, but I wanted to see how my pictures looked, and I went further and did all the selecting and editing of the pictures I have used here before I could relax. Most picture needed something more than just copping and resizing, and so the process took a fair bit of time. The pictures may have been mostly failures, but at least my new leather bikers jacket was a success. It even smells a bit better now.

  I know I definitely had a snooze, but I don't really remember actually sleeping. It just felt like I rested my eyes for a few minutes and opened them almost an hour later, and getting quite close to dinner time by then. The cheese on toast was almost filling, but that did not deter me from wanting a fair sized dinner.

  Actually, dinner was not that big. I know this because it was a ready meal, and it said it was for one person. It was the second Greek ready meal I bought from Tesco, and it was the Mousakka. It was nicer than the meatballs I had first the day before. It was a bit greasy, and one part of my brain thought that was nice, but the other half of my brain was shouting it was unhealthy. I mostly listened to the first side.

  I followed the Mousakka with some ice cream, and it made for a very pleasant meal. I must admit I had a little cube of cheese to nibble on later in the evening, but that was something more akin to greed than real hunger. I spent most of the rest of the evening watching TV - the usual things I see most nights. I did have one pleasant interruption.

  It was a message from Angela that started off saying that I missed a great second set from the Life Of Brian band when I left early. I did comment at the time that they had a shaky start, but once warmed up they were sounding great. Maybe after a great reception at the end of the first set they knew they were back in the saddle and gave a great performance. Even if I had taken my best camera and lens I doubt I would have captured anything better than I captured, albeit in poorer quality, in the first set.

  The good news from Angela is that the band are now booked to play in The Swan in West Wickham on the 8th of November. It is still fairly easy to get to, and is a much bigger pub. It could still be packed, but being much wider there should be better chances of moving around a bit for alternative views. The only good and bad thing is some memories. I can't remember if we were watching The Life Of Brian, and I can't quite remember how it happened, but to my joy I ended up massaging Angela's aching feet for her.

   It was the first real physical contact with her, and while I am not a great lover of feet, it was a good first step. It lead on to massages, errr....further up her legs in the next few months. Sadly Angela got distracted by an old male friend who was, and did die of cancer, and we broke up up before really establishing things as a couple. It will be good and bad memories at the gig in November.

  I went to bed at 10pm last night. It could have been at 11pm, but I saw, in the nick of time, that the vomit inducing Johnny Vegas was one of the guest panelists of QI, and I could not bear to watching it with him there. One other thing I did yesterday was to put my duvet back on my bed. Last night was not a very cold night, and so I didn't really need it, but I used it anyway, and in doing so I may have saved some money by using the heater less (although it was still on all night with the thermostat probably set a bit lower).

  I think I slept OK, although the Mousakka grease did give me a bit an heartburn that I had to cure before I could relax and sleep. I think I remember getting up at least twice for a pee. I also remember one dream I had. I am not sure what to make of the dream. It was a sort of more adult version of a very juvenile dream.

  In the dream I had been recruited somehow buy a secret organisation. They were not exactly spies, but seemed to work by the same rules. I can't recall they had any name, but like something like the 1960's "The Man From Uncle", and maybe even more like one of Robert Heinlien  sci fi stories, the head of this "secret service" was a paternal old man. About the only thing that happened in the dream was some informal lectures about keeping secrets, staying discrete and other (probably) fictional spy crafts. The dream was interesting, but definitely not exciting.

  My brain is still not synchronised to GMT, and I woke up too early, and then went back to sleep and I overslept. For that last bit of sleep I was definitely under the duvet, and it felt rather nice. it was probably that which encouraged me to oversleep. I am not sure, but In think it was close to 8am when I finally got up after an extra hour of sleep (I was up enough to take screenshots of the weather forecasts before I fell asleep for almost an extra hour of sleep. Maybe I feel good for that.

  After three, or maybe two and a half substantial poos yesterday morning, I don't seem to need one this morning, and while I still seem to be perfectly comfortable in that department, it is still disappointing because one big poo may have reduced my weight a little bit. As it currently stands (and I have had breakfast now, and so nothing else counts) I seem to have put on 200gm this morning. That is a bit of a blow after doing some exercise yesterday. looking at my morning weight for the last 6 months it does seem to be about the weight I go back to if I don't continually work at it.

  My blood glucose was quite good this morning. I still don't understand why putting on weight, this implying I have eaten more, does not equate to raised blood glucose as well, but this opposite seems to always be the case. This morning I git readings of 6.3, 6,4, and 6.5mmol/l. That does not average to to lowest I have had this month, bit it is among the lowest readings, and is very satisfying. It is not that much higher than normal for a non diabetic person.

  It is possible my blood pressure is just a tiny bit too low this morning - 108/45 - but it is probably because I measures too soon after eating when all my blood rushed to my stomach to process food I have just eaten. Just going down to the dining room, and then coming back upstairs would probably raise it to a silly figure ! On the whole I think I seem to feel good enough this morning - maybe even good enough for more exercise.

  There are two definite things for this morning, and maybe three. One is to finish washing the small hand towel that has been soaking over night. I can then have a shower (and I guess that adds another definite for this morning). Another thing is to give myself my next Mounjaro injection. That will finish off the first course of 2.5mg injections, and next week I think I start 5mg injections. I wonder if the increased dose will do anything for my weight loss. Anything I have managed since starting Mounjaro has been using tried and trusted methods that can only be done when in the right frame of mind. Oh well, it is not a waste of time for the good it is doing for my blood glucose level.

  I can't think of anything I have to do later. Some shopping might be useful, but I think I may go out for another walk. If the weather forecast has any amount of truth in it, I can probably go out without a coat, and get some sun on my bare arms. If I do go out I will definitely take my Nikon D3200 camera with my 28 to 200mm zoom lens on it. Taking the waterproof cameras was a big mistake yesterday.