09:40 GMT

  It was still 6° C this morning, and it is now 7° C. There has been enough light rain to make the road look wet outside, and maybe the light rain will continue through to sunset. The evening and night may be dry. Once again it seems it will be 6° C through much of the night, but tomorrow could start at 5° C. It should be a dry day, and there may be a scattering of sunny spells.

  Yesterday was a day that started bad, but by mid to late afternoon it was quite a good day. There are a couple of reasons it started bad, and I shall try to explain them further down the page, but the simple reason was a health sort of problem, and as I have just remembered, a gas bag on the phone that spoiled the start of my afternoon.

  I don't think I felt that bad when I got up, but having breakfast seeded the start of some bloated feelings. This was one of the side effects, or maybe intended effects of Mounjaro. It was like breakfast was sitting on top of some of the day before dinner that was still in my stomach. This became more significant later.

  After I finished writing yesterday's piece I had my usual rest, although I think it was shorter than some days. I then went and had a shower, and washed and conditioned my hair. After towel drying me, and blow drying my hair I felt read to go out shopping. I got dressed, and put on one of my medium coats. I didn't want to get too hot under the coat because I was still feeling a bit warm after showering and washing, and blow drying my hair.

  I started walking up the road toward Tesco, and very soon, two things happened. One was that the cold air, even if it was only 10° C cold, started hints of my heart starting to ache. It was made worse by my arms feeling cold. I don't know why that should have been because my coat had fairly thick sleeves, and usually my arms feel a bit hot and sweaty in that coat. Maybe it was worse when walking home, and I had cooled off a bit internally.

  The other thing that was more annoying was that I started burping a lot. Fortunately it was not eggy burps that I have known before when I have eaten something that generate some eggy smells when fermenting during it's extended stay in my stomach (my actual stomach and not my digestive system in general). It was not too bad, even if slightly irritating, on my walk to Tesco.

  When I got to Tesco there were a couple of things on my invisible shopping list that I put in my basket first. One was a couple of bottles of Caribbean hot pepper sauce, and the other was a big top up of instant noodles. The rest of my shopping I more or less made up as I went along, although I did make a beeline to the sandwich shelves. That turned out to be a mistake, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Once I had filled my (hand) basket to the brim I managed to find a staffed checkout with only one person in the queue. Fortunately they seemed to be quite quick and efficient. It seemed like a very short wait before I was served. I had bought enough to fill my rucksack with four 2l bottles of Diet Coke, and to almost fill a big Lidl bag-for-life type bag. It was all a fair amount to carry, but it was less than I often buy from Aldi, and the walk home is a bit less (maybe 2/3rd the distance).

  The weight of my shopping was still enough to put some strain on me, and that plus the cold air had me hovering on the edge of angina pains. My chest was definitely aching, but it was not a dangerous ache in my experience. The really bad thing was that seemed to make my feeling that I needed to burp now and then, ramp up to a sort of feeling of nausea. That walk home felt really unpleasant, and I was more than glad to get home.

  After putting my shopping away I had a yearning for something I should not have yearned for at all. One of the fundamental ideas of Mounjaro as a weight loss drug is that it it makes you feel less hungry.  It seems my brain is a bit twisted when it comes to such things. I seemed to want to push the food that had been retained in my stomach by pushing it down with fresh food.

  I had not previously had such a strong urge, and I probably didn't consider what the outcome would be. Maybe I have learned a lesson now, but experience says no. I started stuffing myself with the sandwiches I had bought. I had three packs of sandwiches and two would have been sufficient at other times. On this occasion I stuffed down all three. I was thinking at the time it was too much.

 Not much later I knew it was too much. I felt disgustedly bloated for the rest of the afternoon, and for this occasion I acted on a lesson learned - I made sure I had quite a light dinner. I'm not really sure if it was a lesson learned because it is not unusual for me to have a bit of guilt when I know I have eaten too much. It made me have quite a cut down dinner later on.

  One thing I thought I would do in the afternoon was to finish hand washing a small hand towel that I had left soaking after I had finished washing my hair. I did consider getting back to that towel a couple of times, but I felt so bloated that I imagine I would have felt very uncomfortable bending over the bath washing that towel. It is still sitting in it's bucket, all cold and nasty, this morning.
 
  I spent most of my afternoon laying on my bed either reading or snoozing. I don't think I specifically remember snoozing, but I know I intended to snooze, and the chances are that I did. By the end of the afternoon I was feeling less bloated. In an ideal world I would have either skipped dinner or had a very late dinner, but I seemed to have programmed my brain that 6pm is dinner time.

  My dinner was not small, but it was rather unsubstantial (or so I told myself). It was no more than two medium sized oranges, a small amount of chilli flavour peanuts and a big slice of angel cake. The oranges were mostly water, and the cake was very light and fluffy (even if loaded with sugar). The most important things were that it seemed a satisfying dinner, and it didn't leave me feeling full or bloated. The only down side is that one orange did not taste that nice, and the other was even less nice.

  There was not a lot on TV because it was a Sunday evening, but I found a few things, and I also watched the first episode of Star Maidens that I had downloaded. To my surprise I had actually seen at least half of it on TV when I first discovered the Rewind TV, or Great TV channel showing Star Maidens and got curious. Having seen the whole of the first episode it does seem to make a little more sense now - if a silly SciFi TV series has any sense.

  I didn't expect it to be on, but I saw that there was an edition of Have I Got News For You on last night, and happily it was on a bit earlier than the weekday schedules. It meant I went to bed some time after 9pm (but I can't seem to remember how much after 9pm, but it was certainly earlier than on a weekday). After getting into bed my memory seems to have gone very fuzzy. I think I may have fallen asleep quite quickly - I do seem to be doing that a lot these days. It doesn't seem all that long ago when it could take as much as an hour before I could fall asleep.

  I may not have slept as well as some nights last night. I seem to remember getting up for a pee as many as 3 times in the night (although some nights have been worse, but not for some time). I feel sure I had several dreams, but only one left some remnants of memories. I know it was set in my last workplace, and although it did not directly include people I used to work with, it did include people who did the same sort of things.

  The main subject of my dream was a fresh-out-of-university young man, and he was part of the "development team" (know elsewhere as research and development). He was working on a project to make the camera we made to autotrack people or "things". One very clever thing he did was to write the software for a test program. It was clever in so much as he could sell it as a side project because it was basically a video game.

  Probably the important bit of the dream was when the owner of the company passed this man, and thought he was wasting his time playing a video game using the companies equipment. That is actually what he was doing, but he was able to demonstrate to the owner how it was a test program to check the auto tracking facility. Instead of a ticking off, or even dismissal (he was at that time an intern working during the university summer holidays), he received much praise for being clever In a way that the boss did not realise).

  After going to sleep early there was no reason to sleep late, but once again I did. Like a lot of morning recently, I woke up at what I thought was too early. I still got up and did the usual early morning routine. I went to the toilet twice, and recorded my weight after the second visit to the toilet. That showed I had gained 200gm since yesterday morning. The only good slant I can put on that was that I thought it might have been more. It was really a disappointment.

  My blood glucose was not too bad. In fact it was rather good, but much of this is because of the good bit of Mounjaro - regulating blood glucose levels as a part substitute for insulin. The Contour meter read 6.7mmol/l, and any figure starting with a 6 is automatically good (now only making figures starting with a five being excellent). The GlucoRX meter read even better at 6.3mmol/l. The GlucoFix meter read 7.3mmol/l - no as good, but that is still a good figure.

  My blood pressure was 113/50, and my blood pressure meter describes that as optimum. I am evidently very healthy. It is just a shame that I do not feel healthy. Maybe I won't feel healthy again until I have had my faulty heart valve fixed, and that could/should happen early in the new year. It is the 8th January when I visit Kings College for tests and meeting the heart valve team. I don't think the procedure will happen then, but hopefully it won't be a long wait after that.

  I'm glad I got my shopping yesterday because it is filthy horrible out this morning, and it may well stay this way for the rest of the day. It is not a day to go out into that rain and horrible grey light. I feel tempted to be ultra lazy today, but there are two things I need to do between snoozes and other resting. I need to finish washing the hand towel I started yesterday, and I have quite a lot plates and stuff in the sink that I need to wash. Apart from that, I am looking forward to reading a lot more pages of the book I am currently reading.

  The book is The Eclipse Trilogy by John Shirley. It is hard book to read on account of it's length. For one thing it is an 800 page paperback that is nearly 3 inches thick, and not easy to hold when laying on my back. It's length also means that I most forget the start of it, and forget more and more as I read more and more. To make matters worse it has several intertwining plots that do come together after a time, but it often leaves me perplexed at time.

  I am not sure it is even a subject that I warm to. I have read too much now to abandon it. I just hope the ending is extremely cheerful because some of it is very dark. You can read more about it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_Trilogy or in the writers own words, here https://john-shirley.com/books/A_Song_Called_Youth.html.








   2,283 words today.