One special/unusual thing about my walk through the park was that I took a camera that I don't think I have taken a walk with for ages. It was my Olympus X42 - a camera bought for about £25 in a second hand shop (possibly the Salvation Army shop). It has a couple of semi unique features. It is powered by a couple of ordinary AA batteries, and so no worries about charging - just buy new batteries from a multitude of places.

  The second unique feature is that it uses a very rare memory card - an XD card. Fortunately for me, when I bought it, it had an adapter card in it that took ordinary micro SD cards.


  There is one other special thing about it that made me want to buy and try it. It was the name Olympus. My first digital camera was made by Olympus, and although only a 1.3MP camera with no zoom, or anything fancy, it took remarkably good pictures. I was hoping that this camera was as good, and it is. Also, being a 12MP sensor, and having a x5 zoom lens, makes it a lot more "sophisticated" than my old Olympus. It still suffers from one problem of that older Olympus - slow shutter speed. That makes both of the cameras fairly useless for taking pictures of moving trains (as a for instance). However, I must admit that I have never delved deeply into the setting to see if a faster shutter may be possible.

  It was a very pleasant walk through the park in the sunshine. The wind made it feel fairly fresh, and that was a good thing, although feeling the heat of the sun would have been nicer, even if I arrived at the hot and sweaty. On most occasions that would not be good, but yesterday it would not matter. When I got to the pub I found that Ayse, my favourite barmaid was still not back at work.

  The governor of the pub, who has had to cover for Ayse, told me that Ayse's partner/husband is still in hospital, and he is in a bad way. His colonoscopy revealed he had cancer of the stomach, and the latest news is that cancers have been found in another couple of organs, It sounds like he is not long for this world.

  It was a rather sombre session in the pub, and that was not improved by talking to Tom, who I usually share a table with. He is a sort of weird person who seems to have little empathy for some others. He has more than his share of medical problems, and swapping symptoms is part of our usual conversations before I feel we have said enough, and dig into my copy of The Metro. Yesterday I almost finished the quick crossword, but my brain was feeling very foggy.
  I took this picture on the way to the pub, soon after I left home. The only relevant thing it shows is the lovely blue sky, but it also shows how good the pictures from that quite (almost) ancient Olympus digital camera can be. Apparently, the X-42 camera dates back to 2000 and so my  camera is now 26 years old, and still working well. One shop is selling one for £99.99. That link also shows some details about the camera. If it now costs £99.99 then the £25 (plus or minus £10) I paid was a bit of bargain.
  This picture taken in the pub garden, and shows a rather battered owl ornament. It looks like the eyes were once made to light up. The broken one shows a small light bulb behind the lens. I assume that there is a hatch somewhere for a couple of AA batteries.
  The rest of these pictures were taken on the way home from the pub. This deep red rose, that looks a bit beyond it's best, was on a small rose bush in the St Mary's Therapeutic Garden - always a good place with nice flowers.
  These flowers, whose name I can't seem to recall, always remind me of the garden of an Aunt's (or probably just a friend of the family) house on the Isle Of Sheppy. Her back garden was full of these flowers. I am sure they had a distinctive smell, but I didn't smell anything yesterday.
  One weakness of the camera, and maybe most cameras, is the inability to capture the reddish pink of these tulips. The real life view is far more vibrant than the photo.
  One failure of this Olympus camera, and the one I bought back around the turn of the century (possibly 2001), is, as noted further up the page, the fairly slow shutter speed. This picture of a stationary train at Ladywell station, was taken with the sun behind the train, and so I had to brighten the picture up because the front of the train was in shadow. I was not surprised to see the shutter speed was 1/100th of a second. That is not very fast, but about what I would expect. However, the first picture in this series, of the lovely blue sky when I started out for the pub, apparently had a shutter speed of 1/500th of a second. That is fast enough to freeze motion, and a bit of a surprise. I can see I am going to have to do some more experiments - purely out of curiosity. If I need picture with a fast shutter I would use one of my big Nikon or Canon cameras.
  This picture was taken at Catford Bridge, and this time the sun is on the front (in the picture, but actually the back of the train), and there is plenty of contrast. The train is not moving, and so no motion blur. I must admit it still looks a bit rough, but I think that is partly artefacts of shrinking the picture a lot to fit on the page.

  It must be obvious that I decided to get the train back to Catford, and there was a good reason for it - shopping ! As usual, the record of the walks done yesterday are with the first at the bottom of the picture on the left.

  The 0.797 miles was the walk from home to the pub. I seemed to have kept up 2.3mph. That is not very fast, but for a stroll with some stops to take pictures, was not that bad. The best thing is that it felt almost like I was back to normal. I did have the start of some mild aches from my ankles, and from my right knew, but neither were bad enough to stop of even slow me.

  The middle walk, the 0.322 miles, done at a slow 1.511 mph, was the walk from the pub to Ladywell Station. The slow speed was because I was doing a very slow walk around the St Mary's Therapeutic Garden while considering what to take pictures of. I might have also been a bit slow stopping the tracker when I was waiting on the platform for the train,

  The last section, the 0.358 miles was the walk from the station to home via the little supermarket on Catford Bridge. I remembered to pause the tracker when I entered the shop, and restarted it when I came out. Going on the shop was the reason I caught the train. I particularly wanted to buy a couple of onions - one red, and the other white, for some cookery I was thinking of doing. While in the shop I bought a couple of their usually very nice, big oranges, plus some Polish mustard, a can of Polish beer, and a small assortment of instant noodles. Evidently I was keen to get home because at 2.748 mph it was my fastest walk - and not must slower than my typical walking to work with no special need for speed walking speed prior to my last lot of angina/heart valve problems of the past 2 or 3 years (or whatever).

  Once I got home I decided I needed to test at least one of my new packs of instant noodles. One was a spicy tomato flavour. I tried to make it in the recommended way, but I think I should have stuck to my own methods. It ended up a bit too watery, but the flavour did seem good. The other was a roast pork flavour, and I was not so impressed, It seemed a little bland.

  After my late lunch I had a lie down, and it was not long before I was snoozing. I seemed to spend most of the rest of the afternoon being super lazy, but eventually I decided it was time to get my dinner ready. It was to be a couple of sausages in a couple of deli rolls with some part cooked onion - that was the reason why I wanted to buy the white onion. I had already mostly cooked the sausages the night before, and originally for dinner, but I decided not to eat too much (or something like that).

  I part cooked the slices of white onion while re-heating the sausages (still covered in foil in my new mini oven). The onion was hardly cooked at all, but just enough to dull the over powerful onion taste. I have to admit it was failed experiment. The sausages and onion just did not really fit in the rolls, and I would have done better to have used sliced bread. It was still a fairly nice dinner - even if rather messy.

  I had a dessert of ice cream with a slice of cake. That was probably enough to send my sugar intake into the red. After the usual TV programmes I went to bed. I read in bed for a while before turning out the light. I think I fell asleep very quickly, but as usual it is hard to remember exactly how and when I fell asleep. If I had a less than perfect sleep it was because I seemed to wake up earlier than desired.

  I may have woken up earlier than desired because it felt like I needed a poo. Of course nothing happened apart from a big pee. The poo would have to wait a few hours until after breakfast, and then it turned out to be quite a big one that was mildly uncomfortable to pass. It is shame it didn't happen earlier because it may have been big enough to make a useful difference to my weight - enough to change the 100gm gain to a 100gm loss this morning compared to yesterday morning.

  My blood glucose readings were a bit stupid this morning. All three meters had a different idea of my blood glucose and ranged from good to bad. The Nexus GlucoRX meter read a good 7.7mmol/l. The Glucofix Sensor meter read a terrible 9.3mmol/l. The Bayer Contour meter took the middle ground with a reading of 8.4mmol/l - not great but good enough.  It made the average of all three to be 8.47mmol/l - satisfactory, but nothing to celebrate.

  With this being the last day of the month, I thought I would note the averages of all three meters over the month. Despite many wide differences between the three meters, their end of month averages were surprisingly similar. They were 7.8, 7.57, and 8.0. From that perspective it is quite a tight grouping. This is why the official lab test uses a method which effectively averages the glucose content over a continuous 2 or 3 months. I am looking forward (with some fear) to my official results when I see the nurse on the 18th of May.

  This morning there was good news. The things I ordered from Aliexpress, in China, have now all arrived in the country, and although some are still awaiting customs clearance, or were, the first parcels are in the dodgy hands of Evri, the so called courier company. I have had no notification yet, but it seems there might be a slim chance for a delivery today ! If not today then tomorrow.

  Apart from waiting for that ring on the doorbell (if the courier knows how to push a doorbell), the main thing on the menu today is another Thursday beer tasting session with Jodie and Michael, plus anyone else who sometimes joins us. With luck Alan and/or Mark will join us - they tend to dilute some of Michaels worst moaning.
  The moon was nice and bright in the clear sky last night. That is two nights in a row. This time I went straight for my big Nikon D610 to get a nice picture. The moon is still not full, but it can't be a day or two before it is full, but on that night it will probably be overcast and raining. It is a law of the universe that Londoners are never allowed to see any interesting night skies.