My thermometers say this morning it was closer to 7° C than the 9° C shown in the screenshot of today's forecast (above). Of course the forecast continues to be revised/updated. It now says it should be 10° C, and I am very sure that is higher than reality. My upstairs, outside thermometer says 8.9° C as I write this, and it is usually cooler down near the garden. The latest update to the forecast has downgraded the morning sunshine to mainly sunny spells, and that is half right. There is a fair bit of rather misty cloud in the sky right now, and every so often the sun is dimmed a bit as a thicker piece of clouds passes in front of it, but so far it hasn't completely blocked the sun. Apparently it could get very dull at midday, with a sprinkle of light rain, but it should brighten up a bit, with even some sunny spells, from 2pm until sunset. Today may reach 13° C. Tomorrow is currently forecast to be exceedingly dull with copious amounts of heavy rain all day long. However it may be slightly warmer, 14° C.

  Yesterday was a day of very little action. Even though I had a one hour slot for a parcel delivery from roughly 2 to 3pm, I couldn't relax until the parcel was delivered. It actually arrived just as the one hour slot was about to run out. It contained less naughty things than I thought....or perhaps I should say less very naughty things, like sugar encrusted ginger biscuits, than I thought I had ordered. Of course there were quite a few slightly less naughty things like quite a selection of pot noodles by one name or another.

  By weight it was mostly safe stuff like Pepsi Max, and reduced, or no sugar, soups and baked beans.  I could have eaten quite a variety of stuff for lunch after receiving my parcel, but I opted for some instant noodle type things, and I really don't know why. In fact, with hindsight I have no idea why I bought them.Well....maybe there is a reason, and that reason was curiosity. What did "firecracker" Chinese noodles taste like, and what did "flaming curry" Pot Noodle taste like ? The former were pretty dull, but a generous sprinkle of hot pepper sauce put some life in them. The latter were sort of bland too, and although hot pepper sauce made them a bit warm, they had very little curry taste, and were certainly not "flaming" !

   Prior to my parcel arriving I spent some time finishing the book I had been reading, and catching up with tech news from https://www.theregister.com/. I did do one other thing, and that was to hand wash the double duvet cover I took off my bed a few days ago. It was a struggle doing by hand. It was very heavy to lift out of the water, and wringing it out was quite difficult. I ended up doing it in two sessions, and finally hung it up to dry on a clothes horse some time after midday. I put the fan heater on low, and blowing at the duvet to help it dry. It was 95% dry by about 5pm. I turned the heater off then, and this morning it was perfectly dry.

  During the afternoon, after getting my parcel, I spent quite a lot of time installing Devuan Linux on my mini PC. The basic install worked perfectly, although I was not happy with the desktop without my personal customisations. The look was the least of my problems. My problems came from using new versions of old preferred applications. The first application, or program, I installed was my favourite web server - Lighttpd.

  The web server worked almost perfectly first time, but the latest version has a small annoyance written into it now. The version I am using for these web pages as I write this makes it easy to have a customised error page for when when an unknown page is requested. It is sort of still possible on the new version, but it is more buggering about than I care for. The very reason I am using Lighttpd is that it has, or had, a very easy to understand and use configuration file. Now it has been complicated......Grrrrr !

  Well, the web server works, and at least I have it configured to show a very bland "Error 404" page for unknown pages. The next step was to install Pureftp - a file transfer program. It is needed so I can write these pages on my main PC and upload them to the server. Pureftp is a simple, and easy to use program....but only when using it's companion program, Pureadmin, to set it up. Unfortunately Pureadmin is not available from the Devuan program repositories, and a version from Ubuntu's repositories doesn't work.

   If I took a few Valium tablets, and a few shots of whisky I could probably wade through the configuration files for Pureftp, and set it up that way, but that can be a mega headache when you only do these things once in a blue moon, and you have to try and learn stuff that you never really understood when you tried to learn it 10 or more years ago. At the risk of messing things up even further, I shall be seeking out other versions, probably old version, of Pureadmin, and trying them. I may have to resort to cloning the hard drive of my working web server. Linux, unlike Windows, can usually cope with being transferred to different hardware.


I almost forgot that I took a quick snap of how it looked outdoors to send to my friend Patricia in Argentina. In the southern hemisphere it is spring, and heading to summer. They have already had some hot and sunny days. Meanwhile we are suffering the worst that autumn can throw at us.

  I took this picture at approx 4pm yesterday. It was still almost half an hour until sunset, and yet there is no hint of the sun even existing in this picture...apart from a sort of grey light. The camera has brightened up the sky a bit, and I didn't want to correct that because it would make it harder to see all the puddles left from a recent shower.

  When it came to dinner I cooked up a very healthy dinner. The only trouble was that after not eating anything similar for so long, I didn't fully enjoy it. It was basically a stew of a couple of chicken thigh fillets with broccoli, and few other vegetables. It was low fat, and very low sugar, and theoretically fairly low in calories. If I had, and I probably will, more dinners like that then I would be back to losing a bit of weight - provided I could avoid things like breakfast, lunch and snacks - easy when out at work all day, or on a long day out for a bit of exercise.

  I found my dinner so unsatisfying that I had an almost naughty dessert. I guess I knew that it would not do much harm to have a tub of low(er) calorie, and sugar ice cream after that low calorie/low sugar dinner. I have to admit it was very nice, and the best thing of all is that it seems that it wasn't such a bad idea after all. The finishing flourish to my dinner was a large whisky.

  Sleep was interesting last night. I seemed to get enough of it, but there were a few odd events. The first was a dream that sort of faded into reality. At 11.27pm (a couple of hours after falling asleep) I was dreaming I was the Stainless Steel Rat (check wikipedia to find out about him), and I was feeling quite relaxed, and even smug after doing something that turned out well (I don't remember that part of the dream). I don't know who I was supposed to be calling, but I reached for the phone. Although the Stainless Steel Rat stories are set in the future, the phone seemed to be a cream, GPO type 711, wall mounted phone. Upon picking up the handset the phone said the telephone exchange wasn't working right now. This didn't seem to bother me, and if anything it seemed to be good. I lay back and relaxed with a smile on my face, and somehow I was in bed with my right arm laying on top of the duvet, and it felt cold. At that point I woke up with a cold arm outside the duvet !

  The second even wasn't a dream, but it was almost one. It was just after 1am and I had got up for a pee. I got back in bed, and just as I was hovering between sleep and awake I heard a noise. A sort of scritchy scratchy, wood gnawing noise. My immediate thought was that there was a mouse in my bedroom. In less than a second I was 100% awake, and realised the noise was not from inside my bedroom, but outside in the road. It was a pair of foxes doing what is a good way of keeping warm on a cold night. They must have been doing it on the move because the noise was not loud at first, but got louder until they eventually moved off. It kept me awake all the time I could hear those unearthly screaming like noises, and for maybe 15 minutes more after they went out of earshot.

  I did have more dreams in the early morning, but I can't remember any of them. I woke up just as it started to become light - which seemed a fair time to me. I seemed to have a few assorted pains, including some lower back pain, but most evaporated away after half an hour or so. I still don't think I feel that wonderful, but maybe I will improve after a hot shower. One item in my Star Bargains parcel was some shower gel. It is of some unknown make, and is Strawberry flavour. It will be interesting to try it, but I have a feeling it isn't going to be very good.

  The best news this morning is that my blood glucose level is once again just 7.2mmol/l. That is just the sort of figure I needed a few weeks ago if I was ever to get my month average down to my target of 7.5mmo/l. It is good that it is as low as it is, but it comes too late to correct my monthly average. Evidently what I ate yesterday was just right...except that it wasn't. It seems my weight has gone back up again after it's little dip yesterday. I hope it is just that I weighed myself too early before I had paid enough visits to the toilet.

  Today I have one thing that I feel sure is going to happen. I haven't had the official notification yet, but an order for some higher capacity RAM sticks has been despatched, and is at the Dartford depot. That normally means they will arrive today some time late this afternoon. This shouldn't affect anything I might do because I will almost certainly be home, staying out of the rain. However there may be a window of opportunity to go out for a bit while it is dry. I do feel like a quick walk in the park after not going out for a walk for a week now (or is it more ?). If I get out I think it will be a case of watching the sky, and just making up the route as I go along. It will probably be no more exotic than a short walk in the linear park.