Continuing the series of hazards on the streets of Earsfield (is it a series ? Was it supposed to be a series ?).... I took the picture above right outside Earlsfield station on my way home from work yesterday. These open manhole/joint box covers could cause a nasty little accident, but it seems that there were once barriers around them, but either the wind, or some of the obnoxious schoolkids from around here have knocked the barriers down. My guess is that these manholes have been left open to disperse gas that has accumulated in them from a nearby gas leak. I have never smelled gas by the station, but there are many places along Garratt Lane where gas can be smelled, and the gas board frequently have the road or pavements dug up to try and fix the problem. There must be a right manky old gas pipe under the road that is full of holes !

 For the next month work will not be terribly pleasant. A test is taking place just 10ft from my desk. It is an accelerated life test of a new pulley or belt, or something, and involves 25 motors grinding away back and forth, making a terrible racket. By the end of the day my nerves may well be frazzled, and by the end of the month I may jump out of the window !

  I felt strangely rotten yesterday afternoon. Bit's of me ached in undefined ways - or maybe different bits of me ached depending on what I was doing, and what posture I was in etc etc. Occasionally I did something to distract me from any discomfort, and it didn't really need to be much at all. Maybe some of what ailed me was just boredom, but not all. One distraction was to attempt to wash the two lampshades that I didn't throw away. They are rather plain lampshades except that have a sort of pseudo suede finish. To my surprise they were quite easy to wash, and unlike the last time I attempted to wash a lampshade these two didn't start to disintegrate.  I think one is going to end up in the hall to replace the current one which has several years of dust on it. The other will probably go in the spare room - which has a less dusty, but still dusty lampshade in it.

 The ultimate cure of at least several aches and pains was to do something that I don't think I had done once in the preceding days of March, and that was to pour myself a very large whisky (plus a second one for luck). If it didn't do any other good, it certainly helped me get to sleep within minutes of turning off the light at 9pm. That was quite handy because expecting my body clock to catch up with BST after less than one day may have been a lot to expect. I slept soundly for 5 hours, but from then on my sleep got a bit intermittent. It seemed like I was awake from 2 to 3am, but I probably wasn't, although I did seem to be waking up at half hour intervals. However I felt quite pleased to wake up 2 minutes before my alarm was due to go off - just as I usually do most weekdays. That makes it sound like I have adjusted to BST very quickly, but past experience suggests I will lapse for a few days in a few days time.

 I hope it feels like a short day, or at least a short afternoon today because I am quite keen to go home again - at least I am right now. I've decided that I don't feel very wonderful today. It is partly a continuation of feeling bad yesterday afternoon, and mostly new stuff. Some of it is a bit like 'flu, but it is not severe enough to be that - at least not yet. Some of it was just a typical (for me) early morning stomach upset. I think I am fine now in that respect, but I did miss my usual train because I was sitting on the toilet, with my stomach making gurgling noises while I should have been walking to the station.

 Other than that, my (semi fictitious) "floating ribs" are causing me some discomfort this morning. It is not usually painful, as I have probably remarked before, but it does feel very strange. For instance, as I walked across the concourse of Waterloo station it felt as if the whole skeletal structure of my chest was swinging from left to right, and back again. In one direction that would almost be a click as if it was almost latching in place - except it's not really a click - it's possibly a bit like a dull, muted soft clunk that is felt and not heard.

 On top of all that it feels like I have put on a lot of weight in the last week. Walking seemed slightly harder than usual, and had me breathing quite deeply - almost up to, but not actually short of breath. My elbows seems to hurt this morning, and the right elbow, the one that has taken the most knocks in my lifetime, is the sorest. I think I can put that down to the cold. My office is not that warm yet, and since taking off my coat my elbows seem to be aching more. My stomach feels a bit tender still, but that seems to be getting better now. Other than that, I feel like I'll probably live to earn another days pittance, and maybe I'll even last to the end of the month and payday - which is tomorrow ! I wonder if I have any spare money to add to my savings this month ?

  After breakfast we went into Aldi where I picked up useful stuff like toilet rolls, and some meat to go with the piles of assorted vegetables I already have here. I could have bought all sorts of crap while I was in there, but in fact I seemed to only buy stuff commensurate with my quest for less consumption of stuff that raises blood glucose level, and stuff that should enable my waist to shrink a bit if eaten in moderation (and isolation - that being the hardest part). I did allow two luxuries. The punnet of strawberries tasted nice, but not that sweet, although they probably did have some sugar in them. The bag of walnut halves won't effect my blood glucose level directly, but they do have a lot of calories in them, and I will attempt to eat them in small quantities and make them last the week (and pigs might fly !).

 The DVD that Aleemah brought over was rather good. It was The Imitation Game - the movie about the life of Alan Turing. I have a feeling that it was fairly, or even remarkably historically accurate for a movie. Maybe that was because no Americans were allowed to re-write history as they do all too frequently. (I've just checked - the Director, Morten Tyldum, is actually Norwegian !). Having said that, I've just read some convincing statements that say it was rather less historically accurate than I thought. Perhaps it would be fair to say that in condensing the storing so it would fit in a 90 minute film, a certain amount of fiction was added to fill in obvious gaps.

 Since Aleemah went home this afternoon, I have done remarkably little apart from eat inappropriately. One of the things I bought on my way home from work last night was a chicken and ham lattice pie that I noticed was marked half price. In theory such pies can not be cooked in a microwave oven, but the puff pastry didn't come out too soggy or stodgy. In fact it wasn't that bad at all - which is more than I can say about the filling. That seemed remarkably tasteless.  I can imagine it being one of the unhealthiest things I've eaten for sometime, and I could forgive myself for that if I had actually enjoyed it an awful lot more than I did !

 I did do one notable thing this afternoon, and that was to finally fit a new mattress topper to my bed. I decided to leave the old, slightly flattened mattress topper in place, and put the new one on top of it. So far I have only laid on it to do a bit of reading, but I think that apart from it being a bit smelly, it is going to be very comfortable to sleep on. The smell is supposed to be some sort of fire retardant chemical that is sprayed on it, and the recommendation is that it is aired for 72 hours before use. I only aired it for 24 hours instead of 72 hours, and I think I might regret it. It still smells rather nasty, and it's probably giving off some cancer inducing chemical smog, but if I don't die tonight it should be much improved by tomorrow night.

Here's a picture that needs some explanation. Across the centre of the picture is a rotten floorboard. It is not obvious on a flat picture, but on the right is a hole where a great chunk of wood has partly come out, and partly been pushed through. On the left a large area has split, and it looks as if it would only need moderate pressure to push the split right through into the void between the floorboards and the ceiling below. Fortunately this picture was not taken in my house. It is, in fact, the floorboard immediately in front of the door of the cubicle in the gents toilets in The Catford Constitutional Club ! Such are the perils of using a building that lay derelict for over 15 years without spending an absolute fortune on it. Eventually that floorboard will be replaced by one ripped up from a disused room in another part of the building - at least that is what appears to have been the case when another floorboard suffered in a similar way in the gents.

  I wanted to buy some Diet Coke on my way home from work, and the most convenient place to get it from was the Turkish supermarket. There are many temptations in there, including their delicious seeded bread, but I resisted most things except a pot of quinoa, corn, and bean salad, a pot of three bean salad, and a pot of chick pea salad (and by pot I mean a smallish container). I also bought a small round of Turkish cheese (at least I think it was Turkish), and a jar of pickled herrings which I hoped didn't have loads of sugar added like the Tesco roll mops in my fridge that may already have passed their use by date because I am reluctant to use them while I am trying to keep my sugar intake down to the lowest I can manage.

 When I got home I prepared my dinner. It was diced lean looking beef in a rich tomato and chilli stock that I had partially cooked the night before, and to which I added all of a small head of brocolli cut into small florets before zapping the whole lot in the microwave for 8 minutes. While that cooked, and then cooled down, I could not resist trying that quinoa and stuff salad pot - never having tried quinoa before as far as I was aware. It was pleasant, but nothing exciting, and I am none the wiser why it should be one of the recent darlings of the advanced foodie anoraks ! That salad pot plus the spicy beef and brocolli stew should have been more than enough for one night, but I couldn't seem to resist eating the chick pea salad pot a little later in the evening. I did manage to save the three bean salad pot to bring to work, and I had it for breakfast just before writing this.

 I seemed to sleep well last night despite being full of beans and stuff. I think one reason may have been that I didn't get any emails or stuff coming through on my phone during the night, and that is very rare. I never hear the phone bleep, but most nights when I wake up in the night I see the little light on the phone flashing to show I've missed something. It's quite good news really because it proves, or at least suggests that it is not the need for a pee that wakes me up most frequently, and that in turn suggests that my high blood glucose may be affecting me less than I thought, and that might mean that it is not so persistently high as I imagine it to be, and that might mean I am clutching at straws !

 I woke up from a very strange, mixed up, but curiously entertaining dream, feeling tolerably well this morning. It's such a shame that the cold, the grey light, and the rain all conspire to make me feel like it should definitely be a duvet day today, but here I am at work. I was feeling quite damp by the time I arrived here, and although one of my work colleagues had turned the heater on for me, and it had taken the worst of the chill off the room, it was still cold and unpleasant, but nowhere near as unpleasant as the train I got on at Catford Bridge - that had no heating on it at all ! Despite my moans about the cold and wet, I seemed to have a lot of energy, or whatever it is that drives me along. It would be totally incorrect to say that it was effortless, but walking, and walking semi-fast, seemed unusually easy this morning. I was even overtaking people going up the slope on the way out of Waterloo East station, and doing it without gasping for breath. Could it have been all the brocolli I ate last night, or was it just the beans ?

 Tonight I have the opportunity to ruin any form of sugar, fat, and calorie intake restriction, although I hope I don't go too far over the top like I did last Thursday. For tonight is boozing night ! I'll be meeting the gang in The Catford Constitutional Club after work, or at least after I get back to Catford. I think I might go in Tesco first though. If I have a couple of carrier bags to carry, and they have some carefully selected tasty, but almost innocent food items in them, I will be less tempted to go into any of the takeaway shops that are within 100ft of The CCC. Maybe tonight I will allow myself 3 pints - but only if it's not 7.4% booze again.......although that was very nice......

I think this is going to be the last of the series, and it is probably the defect that worries me most. This manhole cover, possibly with a high power mains electricity joint below it, has a cracked frame. It is not obvious in this picture, but there is a gap big enough to put a finger through in the bottom, right hand side of the picture. It looks like if anyone trod on it, it would flip over and fall inwards. In a very worse case, but highly unlikely possibility, that could cut into a cable and cause an explosion, and yet it is completely ignored - now. Last year it had some cones around it. So someone knew about it, but the cones disappeared, and that was it - ignored ! If you ever come to Earlsfield, and probably anywhere in the London borough of Wandsworth, please do watch where you step - your life is in your own hands here in the wild (south) west of London.

 Yesterday morning I went past The Catford Ram pub. A few weeks ago there was a massive police bust there, and drugs and stolen property found. The place was shut down, and the licence annulled (or whatever they do) - News story here. The pub is now boarded up, and a notice has been stuck to the outside giving details of the suspended licence - click on the picture above to see it. The word on the street, or at least from a passing street cleaner, is that the brewery has taken the pub back from the tenant, and if they can get a new licence will be running it as a managed pub. That probably means no more music in there, but the beer should return to being good quality, and terribly overpriced ! That's assuming they can persuade the council to issue a new licence for the premises. In the long term it doesn't matter because the whole area is scheduled for demolition in a year or two.

 There is another picture I meant to show on Wednesday (or Tuesday) but didn't. On one of those days I was singing the praises of my new Nikon camera. It really does seem that good things can come in small packets (or whatever the phrase is).

 It seems the plants and animals are convinced that spring is here at last, but I still long for even better weather - summer ! After my walk it finally felt warm inside my office, and I felt a bit better, but it was still a great relief when home time came around. It was still dry and bright as I made my way home, but we had lost the sunshine by then. It felt a lot better to be moving than it did sitting around at work, and I OK as I travelled, but I didn't actually enjoy it.

 Once I got home it was the usual - finish preparing dinner, finish cooking dinner, eat dinner, wait a couple of hours, rush to the toilet, rush to the toilet again, and repeat the last item a few times ! In between times I watched a bit of TV, and didn't really do anything worthwhile at all. Visiting the toilet made it difficult to get to sleep as early as I would have liked, and it was probably around that time that I started getting the idea that I fancied a day off work to see if I could shake off the ailments of the day.

 So this morning, after a very average nights sleep, I decided to cancel my alarm, and go back to sleep again. Taking a day off sick is not a great way to pay for my new camera, but I don't think I could face another day like yesterday. Intense resting should help a few aches and pains, but will make some worse. It's a chance I'll have to take. So now it's time to put my feet up again, and maybe alternate between reading and snoozing !

 The forecast says it will rain, sometimes hard, but mostly drizzle, until early afternoon. If I am lucky it will have stopped when I go home again, but even then it will still be overcast, and rather cool. The best the forecast can offer is a shivery 8° C. The best that I can hope for is that the forecast is very wrong - for which there are numerous precedents ! Tomorrow should be a better day than today. If the forecast for that has any resemblance to reality it should get up to a moderate 11° C while it pours with rain, and pours with sunshine - both at the same time apparently !

 It took it easy on Saturday afternoon, and went on to get a good nights sleep - at least I think I did. I can't seem to recall anything negative about it so I assume it was good. One curious thing is that I didn't feel the need to eat much. I had a few small luxuries, but on the whole I stuck to my veto on sugars, carbohydrates, and fats - although I was not so strict about the latter. I didn't bother to check my blood glucose level, and I haven't since, but I will tonight. I hope that it will have dropped a little bit, but I'll be happy if it has stayed constant - but there is a tantalising hint that it might have dropped a little.

 I treated myself to some breakfast yesterday morning. It was a grilled steak, and nothing more. The sad thing is that I didn't enjoy it.....well I did enjoy it, but not to the orgasmic heights that I was hoping for. Maybe it needed fried onion and tomatoes plus chips with lashings of tomato sauce to be that wonderful, but it satisfied a need, and that seemed to justify it. I was wondering if it would sit on my stomach, and slow me up, but it wasn't all that long after eating it that I went to get a bit of shopping in Aldi.

 There was hardly anything I really needed in Aldi, and I suppose it was just a convenient excuse to go for a walk, but I did get some useful stuff like shower gel, and sugar free Aldi own brand cola. I also bought a fair few vegetables. I do wonder if I have too many vegetables at the moment. Some will keep for a fair amount of time in the fridge, but many need to be used up fairly soon. Some delights coming up soon include pak choi, the Chinese "cabbage" that I'll be having with beef and mushroom stew tonight, and mange tout that should go well with some chicken tomorrow night. Of course both meals will have more vegetables than that, but they will be the principle ingredients.

 Despite the annoyance of some intermittent drizzle, it felt strangely good to walk to Aldi. I don't know why, or even how, but it just seemed very easy to walk there. It was a bit like a dream where you are fit and healthy or something. Of course I am not fit and healthy, perish the thought, and what I did next proved it, or at the least the consequences of it did. I decided it was high time I did some laundry, and yesterday the laundry included a few heavier items. As well as some shirts, I also had a few other types of tops, plus a large hand towel to wash.

 Towels, when saturated with water can be very heavy, and it seems the same is true for a fleece and thing that I can think of a name for. What do you call a top that is like a very thick long sleeve t-shirt with added decorative buttons. It is less than a jumper or pullover, but much more than a t or polo shirt. Actually, maybe "heavy duty polo shirt" comes closest to a description. Whatever it is, it certainly soaks up a lot of water, becomes very heavy, and is a bugger to wring out - so just the same as the towel and also the fleece.

 The consequence of doing all that laundry, is that my chest hurts - or at least several muscles around the chest now hurt when I do certain actions. It is an "added value" supplement to my floating rib syndrome. I can be perfectly comfortable one minute, and then a small twist in the wrong way causes a great deal of discomfort. If it was my arms and legs complaining I would just be thinking I need more practice to strengthen them, but I am not sure if that will work for my chest. (Actually I can feel some very mild aches from an arm muscle or two, but I consider them to be insignificant). I do wonder if I will ever be free of discomfort from my chest since it was cut in two in September 2013 - probably not if I insist on treating it as if it had never needed to heal. I sometimes think that the surgeon knew what he was talking about when he warned me not to carry anything heavier than 1kg for the first few months after the operation. Carrying something like 10 times that amount back from the supermarket a mere fortnight after coming out of hospital might have been a bit of a mistake !

 I have to confess I was quite lazy yesterday afternoon, but once again I managed to avoid any excess eating - even after topping the larder up with stuff from Aldi. Late in the afternoon I did have a strong desire for a nibble, and I had a very large chunk of red cabbage to scoff on. Later on when I made my dinner, I used less vegetables as a consequence. I did have a few other nibbles during the day, and one, Guinness flavoured peanuts, was probably a bit naughty, but at least those peanuts didn't have any sugar in them.

 I wasn't sure if the magic was still working after a few indiscretions over the weekend (including a pint and a half of beer on Saturday morning with Aleemah), but it seems not that much harm was done - if any at all. This morning I thought that my belt felt a little tighter than usual, but not uncomfortably so. That was caused for concern until I realised it was a bit tighter because I had done it up a bit tighter. It was on the next hole along, and also the tightest possible hole without adding a new one. I could have put on one of my old pairs of trousers this morning, just like I did when I met Aleemah on Saturday morning, but I decided that I ought to make some effort to get some more mileage out of my larger side trousers before I abandon them - maybe for good (but I can't see that happening in reality).

 Maybe losing an extra quarter of an inch around my waist should be reason to be cheerful, but the weather almost seems to over ride that. Still, there are other good things to celebrate about to happen that will provide a few minutes of cheer. Today I expect to take delivery of a little pouch to story memory cards, and also a couple of spare memory cards. It's only a few minutes of excitement, but it all helps !

 It was pleasant to walk through the park as the sun was starting to set. Along the way I spotted some daffodils in a sheltered spot that were in full bloom - which fitted in quite well with the feeling that yesterday was a bit like spring (today more so). As I walked through the park it didn't feel like I had anywhere near the energy I had earlier, and it made me quite keen to get indoors to have some dinner. A clue to why this should be is included in this picture....
 This small apple, slightly bigger than a golf ball, yet smaller than a tennis ball, is all I had eaten in about 24 hours as I walked through the park. So it was rather good to get indoors, and after it had been zapped in the microwave for 10 minutes, to eat my dinner.

 Last night's dinner was a beef, mushroom, cabbage and leek stew. With the help of some extra hot chilli sauce, a make that does not use and sugar (as far as I can tell) it was nice, hot, and filling. So filling that it created the usual explosions in the toilet a few hours after eating it. They seem to be a rather unpleasant fixture during this week of very high fibre, very low sugar and carbohydrate meals !

 Maybe if my guts had been stable I might have given some thought to the idea of going to a gig last night. I probably would not have gone anyway, but it would have been a fascinating gig to go to to see how Chain got on without Chris on lead guitar. I have seen a couple of pictures, and a small video clip of last night, and it looks like a gig I really should have gone to, but I was probably already half way to bed before it started.

 I slept rather well - at least I think I did. I'm surprised I wasn't up peeing more than I did because this morning my blood glucose level had crept up a tiny bit - probably just from that one pint of beer. So it's lucky I stuck to my guns and just had that one single solitary pint. Today I am allowing myself a bit of slack for a couple of reasons. Maybe a good one is that this morning I put on a pair of jeans I have been too big to wear for the last 12 months, and this morning they were perfectly comfortable to wear. A fortnight ago I doubt I could do them up no matter how much I struggled !

 So I am rewarding myself a bit for that, but I am still trying to avoid anything with overt amounts of sugar or carbohydrate in it. So basically that means extra cheese or meat, but I have to confess I had 1.5 pints of beer when I met Aleemah for breakfast in the pub this morning ! Of course the other problem is that it is far harder to feel starving when the larder is only a room or two away ! Fortunately all my recent shopping has been for stuff that is "mostly harmless". So I've had a breakfast/brunch of just plain un-dressed mixed salad with a small chunk of cheese. Tonight I think I will be having another beef stew variant. Unlike last night's version, it will have red onion in it, plus loads of garlic (I don't expect to have any visitors tomorrow !). I think I'll leave out the cabbage and leek, and maybe I might see how much sugar there is in a tin of drained (and maybe washed) peas, and throw them into the mix as well.

 There were several good spells of sunshine yesterday, and the temperature rose to a comfortable, if not actually warm, 11° C, but today we begin the slow slide back into winter. It was 6 or 7° C this morning, and initially it looked like the sky would be partly clear, but it has clouded over now. It shouldn't rain (hopefully), but all the cloud is going to keep the temperature down to 9° C or less. The forecast for tomorrow, assuming the grand super computer wizard has done his sums right this time, is for a very dull cloudy day with temperatures peaking at a lowly 7° C. Sunday will be the same except that it will also rain. Another useless weekend !

 Yesterday followed the same pattern as most days this week. During the morning I had a sort of headache, but during the afternoon I felt increasingly better, and I was feeling really quite good by the time I got home. My joy also had a couple of boosts during the day, and the first was during the morning after a visit to the toilet. While doing my trousers up I gave my trouser belt a bit of an additional pull, and did it up on the next notch. It didn't seem uncomfortable, and I left it done up like that for the next couple of hours before my nerve went, and let the belt out to the previous notch incase my legs were turning blue or something.

 The next good thing happened when I got home, and I checked my blood glucose level. My cheese frenzy the previous night did not do any damage, just as I had hoped, and may even have done some good. My blood glucose level had dropped back down below the little blip I measured the night before, and was in fact just slightly lower than the reading the day before that. I am well over halfway towards my goal of getting my blood glucose level back to healthy levels, but it is gruelling work doing it - but it does have it's rewards. My third ego boost (or whatever it was) came when, just for a laugh, I tried on an old pair of trousers that I know I haven't worn, or been able to wear since mid November 2013. I know this, because I found a receipt for a cash machine in the pocket. I think they were the pair of black jeans that I went into hospital with back in September 2013. At that time they were getting quite loose after many weeks of what I am doing now. Uncontrolled food intake after that rendered them unwearable in just a few months - although to be fair, I wasn't in a good position to do much exercise for the first few of those months. Last night I managed to do those trousers up, but only just, and I didn't dare move in case they exploded. Well, it's a start, and if I can put up with the headaches, and other negative feelings, I may be able to start wearing those jeans in another month - maybe !

 I went home via Tesco last night, and avoiding the temptation of a thousand million tasty products was a severe wrench to my sanity chip, but I managed it, and only bought lean meat or fish, and piles of vegetables. In fact the only "luxury" I allowed myself was a 2l bottle of sugar free cherryade - which was rather nice, but only in small, infrequent quantities. Too much of it seemed to be a bit overpowering.

 I only made one stupid mistake in Tesco, but it was one with no significant consequences. I had set my heart of a beef and vegetable stew for last night, but I bought some fresh cod (it is now half price - either because the wholesale price has dropped, or Tesco are doing anything they can to attract their customers back from Aldi or Lidl). That cod would probably have been fine if I kept it in the fridge for a night, and maybe two, but I decided I had better use it as soon as possible. So instead of beef I had cod - which was nice, but didn't satisfy my irrational need for beef. Maybe like the cheese episode, there is something in beef that my body wants. Well it will definitely get it tonight. I prepared, and 75% cooked tonight's dinner last night, and it is waiting in the microwave to be blasted with magic rays for another 10 minutes when I get in tonight.

 I'm not going straight home tonight, but going home via a pub. This will be potentially dangerous, but it is Chris Mayer's retirement drink, and feel I ought to go for at least one pint. My plan is just to have one single pint. I'll just have to see how long I can make it last. My guess is about 5 seconds ! I don't know if I could ever bring myself to do it, but I could stay for a second pint - of water ! I believe pubs are legally obliged to serve tap water for free, but if I were a publican I would be very pissed off if people asked for water instead of beer. So while I don't mind asking for water for others (usually singers or musicians at a gig) I have a sort of fear of asking for water for myself.

 This is Catford's new public toilet. Some might say it is a little too public. It appeared in a useful place, about halfway between home and the station, sometime yesterday, or during the night. It wasn't there when I was going home after Saturday's walk.

 There is only one thing on tonight's agenda, and that is food ! I expect I'll do other stuff too, but as I sit here feeling hungry, I can't help but go over and over again the recipe for tonight's dinner. It is going to be poached salmon, poached with broccolli in some fish stock (unless I've run out. In which case it will be chicken stock). That is all I intend to eat tonight, but it's easy to say that while I am at work, 6 miles (as the crow flies) from my larder and fridge. Maybe I'll have more. We'll just have to see.

 Maybe the temperature was almost right, but instead of thick black cloud, as the little pictogram depicts, the sky was a lovely clear blue, and the sun was blazing down. For the past hour or two the actual weather has got a bit like the forecast - lots of thin white cloud has appeared in the sky, but the sun is still finding it's way through most of the time. Maybe it will rain by 3pm, or maybe it won't. The current temperature is 13° C and still seems to be slowly rising - maybe if it does rain at 3pm it will be a thunderstorm ! Tomorrow is forecast to be worse than today was forecast. Let's hope that forecast is just as wrong !

 It certainly wasn't the logical thing to do after all the good work I did yesterday, but I decided to reward myself with a takeaway curry (but actually delivered rather than taken away). I chose a restaurant I don't think I have tried before, but it scored 4 stars on "Scores On The Door" according to The Food Standards Agency, and that seems pretty good for an Indian restaurant. The food was very nice, but the portions were small - particularly considering it was quite an expensive order. It was probably good for me that the portions were fairly small, although I did try and choose stuff that I didn't think would have too many mega calories in it.

 A few hours after my tasty dinner I went to bed. After all the hard work, exercise and fresh air I felt like I should have fallen asleep really quickly, but I felt too uncomfortable for that. My first thought was that I was bloated from eating a big dinner even though it wasn't that big, but that was not the case. It must have been something dodgy I ate, possibly even the sandwich with the slightly odd taste that I ate at work on Friday morning, but I ended up having to leap out of bed, and rush to the toilet before I exploded - and that happened several times ! After that I did manage to get to sleep, and on the whole I slept well.

 Like many weekend mornings, I woke up at 5am, as I do every weekday morning, and I got up for a while before going back to bed. I then got another hour or two of sleep before getting up properly. Like yesterday morning, the first thing on the agenda was to do some laundry. I didn't tackle anything big like a duvet cover this time, but I did do a medium large bath towel as well as a few shirts and stuff. Like the duvet cover yesterday, the towel was quite a handful - very heavy when dripping wet, but it's now on the washing line where it has probably almost dripped itself dry.

 With the latest batch of laundry done it was time to go to Aldi to get some shopping. Now that posed a bit of a problem. The problem is that I am terrible at not immediately tucking into at least some of the food I bring back from the supermarket. That's not the name of the game at the moment, and so far I have resisted, but I don't know how long I can last out ! The only saving grace is that I was very strict about what I bought, and in terms of sugar, the very worst thing I bought was either the Conference pears or Coxs apples. I don't think there are any calories in broccoli or cauliflower. So I should be OK there !

 Maybe some of this stuff is paying off earlier than I could have imagined - Since getting back from Aldi I can do up at least four pairs of trousers that I haven't been able to do up since earlier than last summer. Mind you, although I can do them up, I don't think they are quite comfortable enough to wear yet - although I could in an emergency. One pair in particular are significant in as much as they were the same pair I was wearing when I went into hospital back in September 2013. That was a period in time when I considered myself to be a lot thinner than I am now. Of course what I have to remember is that I could do more than just do them up in the first days after I came out of hospital - they were so easy to do up that I could do it with my left hand being incredibly weak and useless at the time. It is going to take a lot more effort before they are that loose again !

 It is very hard not thinking about about eating while not thinking about smoking while not thinking about booze while not thinking about sex - what the hell am I supposed to think about at times like these ? This cruel state of mind could force me to do something drastic like getting the hoover out, but before I do anything silly, I think I'll have a nice lie down with my book.

 It took a lot of mental effort, but I was determined that I would go out and enjoy the sunshine today - and also take steps to get a bit fitter too. My first possible destination was Sheerness-On-Sea for a walk along the coast, but part of the journey would have been by rail replacement bus, and I wasn't desperate enough to see the sea to use that ! So I opted for what was one of my favourite short country walks - Eynsford to Shoreham. I thought I would track my walk using the Cardio Trainer app on two of my mobile phones. I started them up, and stopped them within seconds of each other, and yet one said I had been walking for 1hr 21minutes, and the other for 1hr and 26 minutes. Both show an identical track, but one thought I had walked 3.43 miles. and the other 3.58 miles. Both agree that I kept up an average speed of 2.5miles per hour. They disagree about the amount of calories burnt, but there could be a good valid reason for that. I may have different body weights entered on each phone. I think I am going to choose the higher one of 592 calories as being the right one.

 After taking pictures of the burnt out pub I went to the Turkish supermarket where I filled my rucksack with 4 cans of 9% original, and genuine Special Brew. Although the wind was chilly it was bright and sunny, and I decided I was in no great rush to get home (although I did have a strong reason for not wanting to stay out too late). So I decided to wander around to Tesco and buy a sandwich or two (yes, it was two) for breakfast this morning, plus a few other bits and pieces. Those bits and pieces included two bowls of ready mix salad, and some cheese - quite a lot of cheese in fact ! I think the dream I had yesterday morning where I was seeking out some cheese affected me in some deep way. I found I had a strong desire to buy some cheese in Tesco, and I ended up buying some Cheddar and some Double Gloucester cheeses. Then when I looked on the reduced price counter they had a big block of Cathedral City cheese (basically Cheddar cheese) for half price. So I bought that too. I probably have a dangerous amount of cheese now, but I didn't abuse it last night.

 When I got everything home I had a small snack while I got changed, and checked my email and stuff on my PC. Then I prepared dinner. It was a rather healthy dinner of salad and smoked salmon (at least I think it was all healthy sort of stuff), and it needed to be fairly healthy to counteract the "badness" of the earlier snack ! I did finish of with a small chunk of cheese, but it was small, and I ate no more. A little later I also had a can of 9% Skol lager. It was nice-ish, but would have been better if ice cold, but I felt no desire for a second can, and so my collection of super strong lagers now stands at 11 cans - and may well stand like that for another month, or maybe longer.

 While I didn't feel the need to rush home as soon as I could, I was keen to get home to play with some new toys. I bought a new hard disk for the old laptop I have been playing with. At £20 it just straddles the dividing line between a worthwhile buy, and a waste of money. What was a waste of money was an adapter to use a Compact Flash card as a hard disk. I have tried these before, and while they work electrically they are not easy to fit into a laptop. The new one I bought, that came in the same delivery as the new hard drive yesterday, came with a metal bracket attached that was drilled and tapped to be the same as the mounting holes on a 2.5" hard drive - but only the bottom holes, and of course it turned out that the carrier for the hard drive in the old laptop only used the side holes. So the adapter can't be used in this laptop - but I think I know where I might use it in the future.

 With the new hard drive installed in the laptop I tried, and after a very long while, succeeded in installing raw Debian Linux on it. It was a remarkably slow process, made even slower by having to manually install some firmware for the sound chip from the command line, but by just gone 9pm I had the whole thing working in basic fashion. It still needs some cosmetic changes to make it look like how I prefer a computer to look (basically like Windows 2000 or windows 98), but everything works, and it is fairly usable. The one thing that lets it down is the small amount of RAM that the laptop has. It is just about all that it can physically take, but it is not enough for slick operation. One thing it really chokes on, but does finally manage without falling over, is to load one of my extra long full month web pages with loads of pictures and even a movie or two embedded in it (i.e. February). Also, the 600MHz processor doesn't really have enough grunt to play the embedded videos, although I am sure it would play them as stand alone video files...at least I think it would.

 That laptop made me a little bit late going up to bed, but I probably shouldn't have worried about it too much. Getting it working like that gave me a bit of a buzz, and when I finally got into bed, and turned the light out, at approx 10pm, I could hardly keep my eyes closed (yes, closed !). I don't know what time I finally fell asleep, but I guess it was close to 10.30pm. I think I must have slept quite well, and I only remember a single, almost instantaneous snapshot of a dream as my alarm woke me up. That dream had something to do with leaves, maybe a bowl of salad leaves, but something, and I think it was traffic, could only pass down rows of leaves in one direction. I guess it made sense at the time, but it seems worse than nonsense now.

 I guess I feel mostly OK this morning. The added aches from doing gardening type stuff that I had yesterday morning have gone now, and this morning it's just the usual stiffness and aches, although the ache in my right knee seems to be exceptionally mild lately. My trousers do up just as easily as usual, and yet I do feel either heavier or bigger or something recently. Maybe it is just guilt because I have failed to capitalise on the bit of good work I did a fortnight ago (in preparation to seeing that miserable nurse). It doesn't feel like the right weather to eat less/work harder right now, but there could be hope on the horizon. It seems that warmer weather is on it's way, and the weekend could see temperatures of 13° C - and it might be dry with some sunshine too. It's too early to get too excited about what may, or may not happen, but maybe, just maybe, I might manage to make yet another start to try and get a bit healthier if the weather is fine at the weekend.

 Well that was an exciting start to March, and a cold chilly, finger tingling photographic start to Monday morning. There were still ways I could have got to work, such as getting a bus to Lewisham, and a train from there to Waterloo East, but I didn't fancy all that mucking about. So I phoned work and asked for an emergency day's holiday. Now I have nothing to do but sit back and realx while thinking of what to do today. It is not going to be as mild as yesterday, but it should be sunny this afternoon. Maybe I'll go out to the park, or maybe I'll do some spring cleaning, or maybe something else entirely !

I did once, but I am not so sure about it these days. It's not the same place I grew up in, and not the same place as when I bought my house here, but I still remain here. I was born here, and I'll probably die here !

 I did give some thought to going to a gig last night, but I made the decision not to go. There were too many things stacked against the idea. For a start it was in a pub I am not fond of. It's fairly easy to get to, but to stay late means getting two buses home because the train stop running in a homeward direction stupidly early (although they continue to run on the wrong direction until gone midnight). Another set of reasons are that I have got out of practice of going out in the night, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to stay in by myself, but worst of all it was pouring with rain ! So I stayed in and amused myself in any way I could - reading, TV, playing on my PC, etc.

 One little thing I did do last night was to leave a sheet soaking in some bio detergent overnight. This morning my one single activity has been to rinse that sheet out in about five changes of water, and put it on a clothes horse in the bath until it has stopped dripping. Once it seems to have stopped dripping I'll move it down stairs to continue drying, and then I can have a shower and get up properly !

 My only plan for today is to go and get my weekend shopping from Aldi, but I think I'll leave doing that for a few hours so the first rush dissipates, and it may (or may not) be more civilised in there. Maybe there will be some amazing bargains in there today. It's the first of the month, and I've just been paid. Time to go wild.....or maybe not. I'm still saving for my retirement from work. While I still reckon I could just about live on the pension I'll be getting in June, it will have no slack in it at all, and anything more expensive than a potato will need to come from my emergency fund. That fund is looking bigger now that I could ever have imagined several years ago, but one disaster and it could be gone in a flash ! So I had better curb my enthusiasm for spending this months money, and try and save another few pennies this month.