The latest revision to the forecast is a bit more optimistic than the earlier version in the screenshot above. The sunny spells may now last until midday, and the grey clouds in the afternoon are now shown as white clouds. The only negative thing is that the afternoon temperature is now predicted to be just 10° C, although with only one hour at 4pm originally predicted to be 11° C, it is not a great loss. Tomorrow may feature much more sunshine, and the afternoon temperature may rise to 12° C by about 4pm.

   Once I had used my PC for all the usual things in the morning I shut it down for the first time in (probably) weeks. I then booted it up again from the Linux Mint installation DVD that I had originally used to install the operating system I am currently using (Linux Mint 20.1). The live DVD version had all the hard disk tools I needed to first repair the old /home drive, and then clone it onto a new hard drive. The original /home drive (where all my personal data is stored) was a second hand 2TB Toshiba hard drive. It was sold as being removed from a new laptop, and replaced with a solid state hard drive. I am not so sure. It seems to me it may have had a fair amount of use before being sold, and it is now failing.

  Having said that, the date of manufacture is shown as 20th July 2020, and so it is less than a year old. It probably should be returned to Toshiba under guarantee, but I am not sure if I can be bothered to go through all the hoops to do that, although I may look into it. Anyway, having repaired the file corruption I then started the cloning process. That estimated it would take 10 and a bit hours to complete. I knew it would take a very long time, and maybe I might have thought it would taken even longer.

  I have not been having a lot of luck with file corruption, or something similar. Yesterday afternoon I booted up the small PC I have been using to play music during our boozing sessions. I am sure I saw it come up to the full desktop, but then I ignored it because I wanted to set up my old PC in the front room so I could go online if I needed to check anything. When I came back to the PC in the dining room it had a black screen. I thought the screensaver had kicked in, although that should have displayed the time and date. I gave the mouse a wiggle and the mouse pointer became visible, but the rest of the screen was black.

  I am not sure what was going on. I was able to open a terminal and having logged in, I issued the command "startx", and a desktop came up, but not my carefully configured desktop. I was able to open the music player, but there was no sound - presumably because the sound system was locked to the dark screen of my other log in. I am not sure how to fix this problem. I didn't have time to worry about it yesterday, and brought out my laptop to play the music. That did an update, and then complained that I was running out of hard disk space (although it did the update).

  My afternoon boozing session with Jodie started and ended late. It started late because she missed the train again, but this time she had a better excuse - it took her longer to get served in the beer shop by Clock House station. Her excuse for leaving so late was that with sunset now getting so late she didn't realise how late it was getting because it was still full daylight outside (albeit not very bright daylight because of of the clouds). We had a mix of sour beers, which I am not keen on, and several fruit beers, which I do like, but they are not good for me.

  My dinner was not the most healthy choice, and to make matters worse it was not even as nice as hoped. It was "fish strips", although I would describe them more like fish sausages in batter. The batter was allegedly "salt and vinegar" flavoured, and the fish was....well, I'm not sure what it was. It didn't even taste very fishy. I imagine it was probably something like tasteless Pollock - the stuff that is advocated as a replacement for Cod, but is nothing like it. I had it with a can of warmed up marrowfat peas.

  I ate my dinner in the front room so I could use the big TV to watch Star Trek - half an episode of Deep Space Nine, and a full episode of Enterprise. After Star Trek: Enterprise finished I turned off the TV, and headed towards bed - stopping only to brush my teeth and have a wee. I read for a while, but I think I went to sleep as early as 8.30pm. I seemed to wake up quite a lot in the night. It was probably because my PC was sitting there looking dead and silent. Until midnight it was transferring files, and then it did nothing until I shut it down when I got up.

  I was not really aware of when it was that I got up this morning. I am so used to seeing the computer displaying the time and date as a screensaver, and without it I had no idea of the time. I could have and eventually did check the time on my phone, but it didn't seem to register properly.  Once I had been to the toilet, and pulled a few clothes on, I opened the curtains to let some extra light in, and then set about swapping the hard disks over in my PC.

  I was quite apprehensive when I powered up the PC, and my anxiety increased when I saw a lot of disk activity, but still no display on the monitor. Maybe it always takes that long, but I don't think so. Eventually the desktop came up, and everything seemed perfectly normal. My music player started up normally, and carried on from where it left off yesterday morning. Everything else "just worked", but of course those missing or corrupted photos never re-appeared. I will have to spend ages getting those sorted out from archives.

  Once my computer was running I did my usual health checks. The only important one was my blood glucose, and it was insanely high ! I concluded that yesterday started off high because of the three nectarines I had eaten late in the afternoon. So I started yesterday at a disadvantage, and then drank some quite sweet fruit beers on top of it. I feel sure my dinner didn't help either. This morning my blood glucose was 10.9mmol/l, and basically this means I ought to fast until dinner time, and ideally I should try for a 4 or 5 mile walk today.

  I am not sure what I will do today. Just getting this PC up and running with it's new hard disk seems like a big enough accomplishment for the day - even if it took little more than 20 minutes this morning. I feel it would be good to spend a fair bit of today trying to rebuild my picture/photo collection from archives, and once done to make a new archive for safeties sake. On the other hand my health has other, and maybe more important demands on me. I guess I'll just have to take it as it comes.