Today may be a dry day, at least no rain is shown in the forecast. There may even be some nice sunshine in the early evening, but most of the day seems like it will be dry. This afternoon should see 21° C for a few hours. Tomorrow may feature sunny spells followed by pure sunshine, but the afternoon temperature may still only rise to  21° C again.

  Yesterday was a good and bad day. It was bad because I felt bad again. I find it hard to describe the symptoms because it was nearly everything the hurt, felt stiff, felt creaky, and my guts felt funny (mostly the return of the side effect of Mounjaro where the contents of the stomach don't empty, and start to ferment). The good was probably the late afternoon beer tasting session - sort of.

  It was because I was feeling off colour that I had a very slow morning. I managed to do the essentials, like washing my hair and showering, but I never managed to finish doing all the washing up left in the kitchen sink, and I never seemed to find the time, energy, enthusiasm, get up and go, to go shopping like I wanted to. It is possible that I had two packets of instant noodles for breakfast, and with hindsight that was a bit too much.

  When lunch time arrived I knew it would be sensible to have something to line my stomach before the beer drinking later on in the afternoon. I know I had a deli roll filled with cheese and Kimchi, but I may have also had another dose of instant noodles. After my recent delivery for "Asian food" I have quite a few new flavours of instant noodles that are very tempting. It is possible I had two packets for lunch and not for breakfast, but I am ashamed to say it could have been for both breakfast and lunch.

  During the afternoon, actually very early in the afternoon - which was a surprise - the lens hood I had ordered from Amazon arrived. It was for the new (secondhand) lens I bought on Ebay recently. I tried it on the lens and it didn't fit. I am slowly realising that Sigma, and probably other camera lens makers, have a bad habit of changing the fitment of lens hoods on seeming to be identical lenses.

  I may be too simple to realise the subtleties of lens design, but if I was designing them I would re-use as much of an earlier design as possible - and very much so for how a lens hood is attached. At the front of most camera lenses is a threaded area for screwing on filters and similar attachments. All lenses use the same thread, but different lenses have different diameters. That makes the filter designers job easy, and there are plenty of third party filter designers whose lenses only have one important parameter - the diameter. Around that thread is a ring of plastic that has the fitting for the lens hood. Why are they not standard.

  My Sigma lens has no focus motor - the camera body has the motor in it. There is a version that does have a focus motor (as do all Canon fitting lenses), and at first glance they are identical - except they have a different fitting for a lens hood. How bloody stupid is that, and once again I have wasted good money by getting the wrong one because the exact type is not always specified. For a simple piece of black plastic, they are not cheap !

  I tried to have a rest before Jodie arrived for the beer tastings session, but I only seemed to have about half an hour, and that is not enough for the snooze I really wanted. In fact Jodie arrived later than expected, although not that much later. She spent the first 30 to 40 minutes mostly ignoring me as she read The Metro. Once she had arrived I messaged Michael to say she was here, and we would soon be drinking. Michael replied that he didn't think he could make it, but as usual he turned up at about his normal time moaning about the traffic delaying him.

  I have to admit it is nice, or should be nice, to have some company, but these beer tasting sessions feel very dull now. Many of the beers are not to my taste. I sometimes wonder if Covid left a change in my taste buds that comes to the fore with the taste of beer. Of course there are some beers, typically the sour beers that Jodie likes, and seem like a modern invention by brewers who don't know how to brew, that I have never liked.

  It was about 7pm when Jodie and Michael had left, and I looked forward to my dinner. It was to be one of two packets of spare ribs in black bean sauce that I had ordered as part of my "Asian Food" order recently. The only problem is that the cooking instructions said to steam them for 20 minutes, but I do not have the facilities to steam anything here. I cooked them in the microwave, and the result was not so good. No matter how cooked, the ratio of bone to meat was very high. If I had steamed them as recommended, the meat would probably fall off the bones easier, but even so, it was still an awful lot of bone for little meat. I still have one packet left, and I may try boiling that one, but I don't hold out much hope for a satisfactory meal. For a "dessert" I had yet another packet of instant noodles.

  My evening was the usual TV, and then reading a few pages before turning out the light. I think I fell asleep very quickly once the light was out. All I can remember of the night was getting up at least once to go for a pee, and I am very sure I had a dream or two, but I can't seem to find a single memory of what the dream(s) were about. With hindsight I seemed to get up too early, but I didn't seem to be able to sleep any more - probably because the toilet was calling.

  In some ways it would have been nice to have vomited when I went to the toilet, except vomiting is always unpleasant. The reason why vomiting may have left a good effect is that my stomach (not my belly - that is lower down) was full of last nights food, and it was fermenting. I was getting some horrible "eggy burps". It would have been nice to purge that, although after some quite powerful burping it did calm down after a while.

  Yesterday I reported that I hadn't had a poo in the morning, although I am sure something moved later in the afternoon, but maybe it left a legacy of some "blockage". This morning, while having my usual pee after getting up, I did pass a fairly chunky poo, and it was a bit uncomfortable. When I weighed myself I saw I had actually gained about 600gm. That was not good news, but after the beer drinking I did expect some gain, and maybe poor blood glucose readings.

  In fact my blood glucose was not too bad, and might even be described as good - well a two of the readings were fairly good. I got readings of 7.8, 7.8 and 8.0mmol/l. That averages to 7.87mmol/l, and was my second lowest reading this month. In fact only one reading was as low in May.

  Having taken my readings I tried to go back to sleep again, but I didn't manage to sleep, and I quickly gave up trying when I could feel more movement in my bowel area. After a while I got off my bed and headed to the toilet. To my surprise I did a very big (mostly long !) poo, and I also had a small wee as well. The pooing was quite uncomfortable after the previous one had stretched me a bit, and I was very happy once the deed had been done, I was also quite glad to see that my weight gain had fallen to just 400gm, and in fact my weight was 100gm less than the day before yesterday.

  This morning I feel, or maybe felt lousy again. In some ways it feels like a very mild version of 'flu. All sorts of joints and muscles seem to be aching. Maybe no serious aches, but still enough to be annoying. Oh well, at least my blood pressure is pretty normal this morning - 125/75 - although my pulse rate of 74 is a bit high.

  I have several plans for today. They all start with my usual lie down, and very often a snooze, once I have uploaded all these words to my web server. The next, and important thing, is to finish some laundry I started yesterday. This time, after lots of experience, I didn't even think I would ever finish yesterday, and knew I would have to finish it today. Once that is done I will probably take a walk to Aldi to buy some food I need, and probably food I shouldn't eat. I think once I have finished in Aldi I can return to extreme lazy mode again.......probably. The only other thing I thought I might do is, I have just realised, tomorrow night. It is a Chain gig in The Partridge pub in Bromley - easy to get to, but it does get stupidly crowded. I may only stay for half an hour to get a few snaps on my Canon camera with the new Sigma lens on it - the same lens as the favourite on my big Nikon camera, and which fortunately came with a lens hood. Hopefully I will be in the right mood for this gig tomorrow, but first there is today to get through.