09:03 GMT

  Apart from a bit of drizzle in the morning, yesterday featured many sunny spells, maybe even an hour of full sunshine, but it did start to cloud over later in the afternoon. The afternoon reached 14° C for several hours.
  There was some brightness this morning, but now it may have just started drizzling, or if not then the horrible grey sky says drizzle and even rain is not far away. There may be light rain from 10am until 6pm today. One oddity today is that the temperature is now at it's peak as I write this. It is currently 13° C, and by midday it will start to cool. By 8pm the sky may be clear, and then the temperature will sink very low, just 8° C by midnight. Tomorrow morning may start at 7° C (I must admit I expect lower), but it will start with full sunshine, and that may give way to just sunny spells at 1pm when the temperature will be up to 13° C.

  Yesterday was quite a good day. It is possibly a shame that I have not got any photo evidence of the productive day I had. The simple version is that I did more housework than I usually do in a month, or probably longer. It was hard work, and satisfying in a sort of masochistic way. I'll try and give a fuller description of my day below.

  Like nearly every day, I started yesterday with breakfast (instant noodles again) and then started writing yesterday's description of, mostly, the previous day. With all the pictures I included, and writing a small description of them, I ended up writing one of my longer, possibly even one of the longest pieces, 3,611 words ! That took a long time, and I felt I deserved a long lie down afterwards, but I am not sure I actually had a longer than usual lie down. I don't think I had a snooze, but I wouldn't definitely say I didn't.

  It had been my plan to go out for another walk yesterday, but that never happened. I could have gone out unwashed, but it didn't feel quite right. I could not have a shower until I had rinsed out a hand towel I had left soaking in detergent overnight. It didn't feel that bad doing it, mainly because it was only a small hand towel, and not a more cumbersome bath towel. With that done, and hung up to dry, I could have had a shower, but I could no be bothered. I had a better idea.

  I made the weird, mildly insane decision to wash some clothing. I had accumulated a lot of smelly underwear in my washing basket, rather more than I realised, and I put that into soak.  In a rare display of sanity, or maybe it was insanity, it felt like it would be good to do that laundry non stop, and it was not too long before I was hanging it up to to dry on the big clothes horse (I had moved the towel onto the small clothes horse, and I had the desk fan blowing through tyhe big clothes horse and onto the towel on the small clothes horse.

  I had a small rest next, and more short rests between other housework I did. I think the next thing was to do all the washing up, and when the sink was clear I also cleaned up a glass jar that had a scented candle in it. I did not want to contaminate any eating stuff with strong scents. The first stage of the process I did when I was making my breakfast. I made sure I put enough water in the kettle for my instant noodles, and enough to pour into the glass that had the scented candle in it.

  The wax melts, and floats to the surface. Once cool the wax can be picked off the top of the now cold water. Then some petrol lighter refill helps melt the glue that is used to hold the wick holder down, and also helps remover any sticky labels. Then it is just a case of scrubbing off any more wax using a sponge scouring pad (as used to clean dishes[but not once it has wax and petrol on it !]). It is not hard to get the glass perfectly clean, and many types can serve as normal looking drinking glasses. Others for something else.

  With th washing up done I don't think I had a rest, but went straight on to a little job that I enjoys for some destructive reason. I had several beer delivery cardboard boxes piled up in the dining room, and it seemed like a good time to take them outside, and using a Stanley Knife with a sharp blade in it, cut them up into flat pieces of cardboard that meets ate approval of the recycling bin dustmen (the don't like whole boxes because they take up too much room).

  With a lot of the dining room free of at least some clutter, the next think was to bring the "hoover" down from upstairs (where it doesn't really belong), and give the dining room carpet a good hoovering. It is both fortunate, and unfortunate that my "hoover" is an EU approved low power (just 800W) thing I bought in Tesco. It's suction power leaves a lot to be desired - except in one case.

  There is a cheap, Poundstretcher rug in the dining room, and it is shedding tufts of wool from some edges. A nice high powered vacuum cleaner would probably end up making it completely bald in a short time. On the other hand, the knackered old carpet in the dining room seems to collect so much fluff, and human hair, that a super powered vacuum cleaner would save hours of scrubbing backwards and forwards, and then giving up and using my hands to pull off fluff and hair while trying to get that carpet clean.

  I bought the carpet as a cheap off cut when I fist moved here in 1983. It has probably not done too bad, and if I got a carpet washer on it, it might even come up looking not too bad, but 40 odd years of grit and fag ash, spilled food and beer, and Diet Coke have left what seems to be an indelible mark on the carpet. I would, and probably will, try and buy another cheap off cut from the same company who have moved their shop to the main road. The real bugger of the thing will be trying to get everything out of the room - if indeed that is ever possible, so I can lay the new carpet down.

  I also "hoovered" the hall carpet, and that pulled up a fair amount of grit and fluff, but once again that carpet has lead an even harder life, and also needs replacing if it is ever going to look good in the hall. I also gave the bottom half of the stairs a sort of powered dusting, but I was feeling too tired to do anything better like a full vacuum cleaning. I think that is probably the last housework I did yesterday. It seemed quite enough for me at the time, plus lunch time was fast approaching....or maybe had passed.

  My lunch was another based on toast, but this time I put a small can of mackerel in spicy tomato sauce on one, and mackerel in creamy mustard sauce on the other. I put a sprinkle of gated cheese on both, and gave them a few minutes in the microwave to melt the cheese and warm the fish. It seemed like it should have been good, but it was quite disappointing, even if perfectly edible.

  After lunch I may have had a snooze, but I definitely fell into a very lazy mood until it was time for dinner. I am sure I did something, but it may have just been laying on my bed reading my book when I wasn't snoozing. I was going to say "before I knew it", but maybe the hours did not pass quite that smoothly. Maybe "eventually" it was time to prepare dinner was closer to how it was.

  Dinner was very simple prepared. All I had to do was to heat a couple of Polish sausages in the microwave for 2 minutes (I had cooked them in the mini oven and ate half of them the day or two before). Those sausages look all exotic and delicious, but they are merely "nice", and maybe not even as good as a well cooked pork "banger". I ate them with my fingers once they had cooled off a bit, and I had dips of both (Jamaican) chilli sauce and also tomato purée.

  I followed those two sausages with a rather generous amount of ice cream (the tub was getting close to be used up, and I just speeded that up).  I didn't really eat anything more than I have described here, and it did not feel like I had eaten a lot yesterday. Much of it might possibly even be called healthy, but this morning my health readings were not bas good as hoped.

  After my dinner I mostly slumped down in front of my "TV", or as much as you can slump down in an office chair in front of my PC showing Freeview channels using a DVB-T USB stick. There is one more thing I did, mostly while watching TV, and it was to play with my cameras. After the terrible pictures I had taken of The Life Of Brian band because I chose the wrong lens for my camera, I have done some testing of alternatives.

  A day or two earlier I had used the same camera, my Canon EOS 1200D with a couple of lenses. One was semi good, but one was ideal - with a small catch. Thinking back to when I first bought that camera, and then started buying lenses for it, l thought I remembered a huge improvement when I bought a fixed focal length (no zoom), 28mm, f1.8 lens. It has such a big aperture that it lets enough light in to focus on some quite dull scenes.

 One very simple test was to use just the light from my bedroom, which only has a fairly low power bulb most of the time), illuminate a t-shirt hanging on a coat hanger in the hall outside my bedroom. It was quite a dim scene even to my own eyes, but the camera was able to focus on it OK, and it gave a sharp but noisy picture of the t-shirt.

  The experiment last night was to see how my Nikon D3200 camera would cope using a similar lens under low light levels. The nearest equivalent I have is a 50mm f1.8 lens. The aperture is the same, and it performs very similar under low light, although I think the Nikon camera itself copes a bit better with lower light. The main downside is that a 50mm lens gives a much narrower field of view. In some cases that is equivalent to using a bit of zoom, and could be useful, but for wider view I would just have to walk a bit further away.

  The next big chance to try one of these cameras for real will be on Saturday 8th November when The Life Of Brian will be playing The Swan in West Wickham. In an ideal world In would take both cameras with me, but I am not sure I can be bothered to lug two camera there......but I suppose it could happen if I feel super healthy or something equally mad.

  As is often the case, the last TV I saw last night was QI, and it finished at 11pm. I had another late night. I guess I was half asleep because I don't remember much about it, but I suspect it was one of those great nights when there is no mucking around, and I was fast asleep very soon after my head hit the pillow. My bedroom was quite warm when I went to bed, and I think I slept with the duvet pushed aside, but some time in the night I pulled the duvet over me. It was possibly after coming back from one of several pees in the chilly feeling bathroom.

  Despite thinking that my extra generous amount of ice cream would raise my blood glucose to needing many big pees in the night, it dd not seem to raise it that high - thanks to the effect of the Mounjaro. Although supposed to be a weight loss drug, it was originally formulated for, and excels at controlling blood glucose levels.

  A bit more peeing might have made my weight look a bit better. I did put some weight on, and it was 200gm. That is not the end of the world, but too many little gains like that add up to too much after a shortwhile. It was after breakfast that I managed to have a poo. It was another hard, and hard to do poo, and maybe it might, with a lot of blind faith, weighed as much as 200gm, but I never bother to weigh myself after I have just eaten.

  My blood glucose was, once again, good enough, but nothing to celebrate. I got two sixes and one seven. The Contour meter read 6.6mmol/l, and on reflection, maybe that is pretty good. The trouble is that I have had a few rare fives (5.xx mmol/l) in the last month or two, and I am greedy for more, but sadly, none today. The GlucoRX meter read 6.3mmol/l - getting closer, but still just a six. The GlucoFix meter read 7.4mmol/l, and once again it is the highest reading. It always seemed to give the lowest readings when I first started to use it.

  It may be the approaching (actually it is here already) rain that is doing stuff to my body, but I don't feel very good this morning. For two pins I would have a nice snooze when I have finished writing this, and I could if I kept it short or risk being late - late for my Wednesday lunchtime inn The Jolly Farmers. Today will be an excellent time to test my now leather jacket in the rain. At least it would if I can master the doing up of the zip without embarrassing myself in the pub. There is no difficulty at all in doing the zip up, but the first step of getting the zip in the runner (for want of a getter name) is really tricky when I almost have to do it by touch.

  Before I have to worry about that I want to wash my hair and have a shower. I think that will allow about 5 minutes for a long snooze, and 10 minutes for a shampoo and shower before I have to throw some clothes on and start walking to the pub. I think I am going to be late, and possibly not go at all. On the other hand, I want to get a bit of shopping on the way home, and so I suppose I will have to go even if I am very late.