There have been some sunny spells this morning, but as I write this it seems to be getting very cloudy. This seems to be as forecast for today. Maybe the next sunny spells will be at 7pm tonight. Although it is going to be a dull day, it will still be mild. It is 15° C as I write this (according to my thermometers) and the afternoon should see 19° C. There is a small persistent chance of rain today, but no rain is shown on the forecast. There should be a mild night, and tomorrow may start bright again. Later in the day there will be both sunny spells and full sunshine. Tomorrow afternoon could see 22° C.

  Yesterday was a curiously pleasant, and in parts, enjoyable day. My "improved" health readings made for a good start, but the weather was also a plus point - even if the weather forecast looked very negative. Fortunately the weather forecast turned out to be wrong.

  After my breakfast of a small pack of instant noodles, and a rest after I had finished writing, I gave in to the desire to go out for a walk. After my recent blood pressure oddities, and a few suspicious chest pains, I did wonder how it would go. To my surprise it went really well !


  I decided I would not attempt anything worse than walking to Ladywell and back. To slow myself down a bit I took my Canon 600D camera. It is quite a nice DSLR camera, and my best Canon camera. It is not as good as my big Nikon, but still pretty good. On the other hand, I didn't think the pictures I took were as good as hoped.

  Stopping to take pictures, or sometimes considering a possible picture, slowed me up, and apparently I only averaged 1.757 mph. I think I probably managed some bursts approaching 3 mph - my old walking to work speed when I was feeling fairly fit.


  I took the path on the east side of the park for a change. That passes the backs of some houses, and also what in my ignorance I call a small "happy clappy" church. At the back of the church there must be a garden, but all I cans see over the fence is the top of a rose tree (bush ?) that has some rather nice red roses on it. This picture of one of the best roses looks very slightly flat, or almost, but not quite, perfectly focussed.
  I usually take a picture of these two trees in the autumn when both put on a colourful display, but it seems they can be colourful in the spring as well.
  I was quite happy with this picture. This dog was running across the grass at full speed. I panned the camera to keep the dog stationary in the viewfinder, and took the picture. The dog seems in pretty good focus, but the grass shows some motion blur.
  My reward for walking to Ladywell station is a chance to stop and rest for a short while, and also to take snaps of any trains I see. I only saw two trains and neither was needed for my collection, but I only knew that once I got home and checked the number on the front of the train with those already recorded on my spreadsheet.
  Nothing seems to be happening yet to the area that was, until a few weeks ago, the Ladywell Fields Skate Park. It has been stripped of all the ramps and stuff, and swept clean, but that is as far as the work has got. Maybe it was getting so little use that it may be returned to grassland, or maybe some new will be found for it. Watch this space.
  Some things are so common that I never stop to photograph them, but yesterday I decided it was time to take a snap of a dandelion "puff ball" (or whatever name you have for a dandelion seed head). On reflection, I could have zoomed in a bit more so more detail could be seen.
  I am unsure if this is a "wild rose" of a "dog rose", but I am fairly sure it is a member of the rose family even is it is about as plain as can be.
  It is not often a sparrow stays still for more than a few seconds, and in that time seems to pose for the camera. I had to use full zoom, and crop the image a lot to get this not all that good close up. I had just left the park when I saw several sparrows flying down onto the road and pavement where some tree seems to be shedding lots of stuff - possibly soft stuff that might be used in a nest (is my guess).

  It was shortly before arriving at the exit to the park that I started to suffer from some stiff ankle pain. That, and occasional bit of knee pain, has been making these walks a bit of a challenge since getting out of hospital in January. All that laying around in or on a bed, and with no opportunity to keep keep my legs from seizing up, left a legacy that is only slowly fading. It is much improved now, and hopefully my legs will be back to normal again soon.


 It was nice to get back home, and I rewarded myself with a lunch of ice cream. It was Aldi own brand, and like Tesco own brand (and probably most supermarket own brands) seems to have far less sugar in it than, say, Walls ice cream. The tub of that I bought on a whim was a disaster. My tracking app, "Simply Walking" reckoned that walk burnt 197 calories. I tried to make my ice cream lunch as small as I could, but I would be surprised if I got away with less than 200 calories!

  I really wanted a long lie down after my lunch, but I gritted my teeth, and made a start of copying all the photos to my PC. I then selected and edited them for showing here. On the whole I was happy with the pictures taken with my Canon 600D camera with Tamron 18 to 200mm zoom lens. Tamron is a cheap brand, and maybe not as good as a genuine Canon branded lens. On the other hand, 18 to 200mm is a very useful range between fairly wide angle and quite a bit of zoom. The version I have got for my Canon cameras seems fairly good, but the same lens for Nikon cameras seemed to give very soft results. I had to stick my hand a bit deeper in my pocket to buy a genuine "Nikkor" Nikon lens for my Nikon cameras. It did give much nice pictures.

  On the subject of lenses, I spent 20 minutes looking on my favourite secondhand camera an lenses sellers web site. I was thinking it might be nice to get the same lens as I use on my very best Nikon camera for all my gig photography, but for a Canon camera. I was shocked at the prices I saw. I thought they were a fairly cheap lens (cheap compared to some very expensive lenses) but it seems they have now joined the ranks of the very expensive. The cheapest I could find for a Canon was £613, and if I needed to replace the one I use on my Nikon it could set me back over £1000 !!!! I bought that lens in a secondhand shop for half price - £150. It was originally on sale for £300, but I thought it was faulty. I took it back to the shop with my camera and showed that auto focus did not work. It could be manually focussed (although I am not very good at manually focussing). I said to the man in the shop that I would be happy to pay half price and use it as it was, or I would want my money back. He had a word with the manager, and they agreed I could have it for half price, and pay what could be a lot more for it to be repaired. It was maybe a year or two later when I discovered it was a lens that uses a focus motor in the camera and not the lens. When I bought an old Nikon camera, it worked perfectly ! It was probably my best camera lens buy ever !

  One other thing I did in the afternoon was to check Amazon for a new charger for my Canon 600D camera batteries. My current one is a genuine Canon charger, but it is getting old, and maybe there are hints that it is starting to fail. That charger is mains operated, but many replacement chargers are powered by a USB connection (the same as a mobile phone). I found several on Amazon, but no matter which I chose, and no matter how much I increased the value of my whole order, they would not do free delivery.

  I nearly gave in, but then I thought I would check Aliexpress, the Chinese equivalent to Amazon. They not only had lower prices, but even with the addition of shipping charges, I could still get two spare batteries and a charger cheaper than from Amazon. The only problem with Aliexpress is that you have to be very careful about exactly what you are ordering. On my first attempt I seemed to have only ordered a battery with a charger. I tried again, and this time I hope I have ordered the charger with two spare batteries.

  I am going to have many spare batteries for my Canon 600D. I feel I am going to have to make much more use of that camera, and I may start using it at small gigs. Using my very wide aperture lens and/or attached flash, it should preform OK at some dimly lit gigs. For bigger, more prestigious gigs, such as the few festivals I try to go to, I'll stick with my big Nikon. One other plus point of the Canon is that it is a much lighter camera. The big Nikon, with it's big lens, is quite a weight to lug about.

  I fancied a nice, but hopefully almost healthy dinner yesterday. Circumstances lead me to having something that just about satisfied that idea. I had a pile of sweet potato chips, which are better for me than ordinary potato chips, with one single Frikkadelen (German spiced pork burger pate from Aldi). I thought there were two Frikkadelen left in the pack, but there was just the. It probably was not a good excuse but I used that fact as the reason why I had some ice cream for dessert.

  It felt like I had had quite a satisfactory day, and all I needed to do was to keep that feeling until I fell into blissful sleep. After watching some TV, and reading a bit in bed, I think I did indeed fall asleep feeling good. I am not so sure I slept as well as hoped. Alternatively I slept so well that I didn't realise I was somehow not sleeping comfortably and woke up with a few aches.

  The good news is that my walk, and taking some care (albeit not much) with my eating, meant I seemed to have lost 800gm since yesterday morning. As I feel I probably always say, if I could only do that every night.... My blood glucose was also pretty good this morning, and maybe is confirmation that eating the right type (generally supermarket own brands) of ice cream can be fairly safe. This morning the average of all three meter readings was 7.83mmol/l, and that is very satisfactory.

  The big thing on the menu today is my rebooked appointment with the diabetes nurse at the surgery. That is at 11am, and so I have had more time to write this, and still time to have a shower. I washed my hair last night, and so that does not need to be done.

  If my appointment is at 11am it will mostly likely be closer to 11.20am. By the time we have finished it will be about the time when I could go for a wander through the park, and end up in The Jolly Farmers. It would be nice to see Ayse, my favourite barmaid, but I suspect she will not be there again because she will be caring for her husband/partner who is seriously ill in hospital with stomach or bowel cancer (and second hand information says it has spread to other organs). I'll pick up a spare copy of The Metro just in case she is working today. I suspect I'll spend most of my time in the pub hunched over the crosswords in the Metro while drinking my two pints of Guinness.