The sun is doing it's best to shine, but the sky is rather cloudy. The latest revision to the forecast says 9am, or about 10 minutes time, should feature full sunshine. I can't see that happening with all the clouds I can see piled up across the sky. Actually it does depend on where you look. There is a fair amount of blue to be seen overhead, but to the east, where the sun is, it looks quite grey. The latest revision to the forecast does not show many differences to that in the screenshot above. The most notable change is 3pm is now shown as dark clouds like 4pm. A more minor change is only two hours at 18° C are shown at 2 and 3pm. The beginning and end of tomorrow are currently predicted to be very wet, and with even a single thunderbolt thrown in for 6pm (The BBC forecast predicts many more thunderbolts !). The middle of the day should/could be dry and bright, but not actually sunny. Tomorrow afternoon may only reach 17° C.

  Yesterday was a day of two different halves. The morning seemed OK. It felt good to go out to buys stuff from Tesco, but soon after getting home my mood changed in a negative direction. It could have been triggered by a short period of rain, or maybe it was just because it was cold in my bedroom - that is to say it felt chilly when being very sedate. For a little while there was some warm sunshine coming through my bedroom windows. Maybe that relaxed me when I shouldn't have been relaxed.

  I felt fine walking to Tesco, and it was no trouble walking home carrying quite a weight of shopping. Rammed into my rucksack were 4 x 2 litre bottles of Diet Coke, and three cans of canned beans - three different types. My shopping bag was not quite so stuffed. There was a lot in it, but no individually heavy items. There was no reason at that time to think there would be any reason for a boring and depressing afternoon.

  I can't quite decide if I was bored because I was depressed, or if I was depressed because I was bored. The obvious answer was the depression came first, and there was some sort of trigger for it. On the other hand the trigger may have made me bored via a different route. It's all a bit mixed up, and at the time I had no inspiration to analyse what caused what.

  The trigger was a large pack of southern fried, ready to cook, chicken.  When I put it in my shopping basket I guess I already new I wanted something to excite me, but ultimately it had a negative effect after a short spike of goodness. The problem, or a problem, is that once all the bones were set aside it didn't seem such a big amount of chicken. Most of it, except for two very small thighs, were drumsticks, and each of those only had two mouthfuls of chicken on them. Eating half the pack would have felt too little, and the whole pack, too much.

  There was obviously some guilt in eating too much, but maybe the more significant thing was that I felt a bit stuffed - not enough to be uncomfortable, but enough to feel the stodginess of it all. It seems unlikely that was the whole reason I felt bored and depressed, or depressed and bored, for most of the rest of the day.

  I did my best to do something useful in the afternoon. It was to go through some old magazine cover disks to see if there was anything useful to copy over to an external hard disk before throwing the cover disk away. In some ways it was a pointless exercise because much of the stuff I might keep is available on a web site called "Old Versions". Perhaps knowing it was sort of pointless meant I couldn't concentrate on the job. I couldn't even concentrate when I found a lot of mp3 files on one of my old back up DVDs from 2004. I just copied them en bloc to an external hard disk, and will have to sort them out another day.

  Later on as the afternoon gave way to evening I did two things to cheer me up. Both could be called "retail therapy", but neither was just spending money for the fun of it. The first thing I knew to be madness before I even did it. It was to order a Chinese takeaway. In one sense it was very bad because I knew it would be very bad for my blood glucose, but there were good aspects about it.

  Earlier in the day an email from Just Eat included a voucher for 30% off. I chose a restaurant that offered 10% off for orders over £20. So I go a double discount. The food was not quite as good as expected - chiefly because I got two portions of roast pork in black bean sauce. One of them should have been chicken in yellow bean sauce, but those two identical dishes were still nice, and they were the only things I had from the order. I have enough left from the order for nice dinner tonight.

  Half the reason for the takeaway was that I couldn't be bothered to cook what I had bought from Tesco in the morning. The other reason was it was a nice treat for myself. I don't know if the other order I made can be called a treat. It was a brand new computer keyboard. My existing keyboard, probably because it has been used with sticky/greasy fingers, is missing the markings on the most popular keys. It is great for forcing yourself to learn the positions of all the keys on a QWERTY keyboard, but can be a bit tricky when typing in passwords and similar important stuff.

  The keyboard I ordered was quite cheap - just £9.97, but it is made by (or branded) Microsoft. One of the curious things about Microsoft is that their hardware is infinitely better than their wobbly software. It is sort of ironic that I will be using this new Microsoft keyboard, along with my existing Microsoft Mouse, on a non Microsoft operating system computer. It is actually Linux Mint XFCE desktop edition. It is skinned to look just like Windows XP !

  There were two late evening episodes of QI on last night, one shown after the other. As a result I didn't get to bed until just after 11pm. It wasn't long before I was fast asleep and dreaming. I seemed to have many dreams last night, and many had negative aspects. I think the first I partly recall was about some sort of mutant/alien animal like a small cross between a cat and fox. They would creep up on you when asleep, and then start eating you alive. The only thing you could do was to grip them tightly around the neck until they died. It was a most unpleasant experience, and I was rather happy to wake up from that dream, although even then another negative thought cropped up. If I was throttling that animal while still in bed there would be a strong chance of it crapping all over the bed as it died !

  Another dream seemed to carry a sort of meme through a couple of episodes. The meme was basically being lost, and probably reflects most of my life these days. In he dream I was doing a much grander thing than my ongoing quest to visit all the most distant places my Freedom Pass can take me to (on trains) for free. In the dream I had a one day pass that covered the whole of the old Network South East rail area - some of which extended a fair way across the lower half of the country.

  I had arrived at a station whose name I didn't seem to know. All I knew is that I had travelled a long way to the west. I had a look around outside the station, and then attempted to retrace my steps. I arrived back at what I thought was the station, but I couldn't find any maps, or timetables to tell me where and when trains would go. What I wanted was a train that would connect with another line that would take me back towards London.

  One oddity was that it was a very big station, perhaps leftover from a time when it was a more important station, but now it only served one small line. After wandering around, and getting nowhere, I went into a pub where I met Angela. This was obviously a different episode of the dream. After a while we were joined by another woman who I think I sort of know. Eventually Angela had to go back to work, and we had a very warm hug before she left. The other woman said something like "that looked nice".

  The next thing I knew it was back to trying to find a way home, but this time the second woman was still with me. After a while she remarked that she was sure she had signs that pointed to a north and south stations. We went outside the station and saw a sign pointing to the south station. I still had no idea what the station name was, but I had been wandering around the north station. Once that was established, and we were walking to the right station the dream was fading out, but not before telling the other woman, who was very attractive, that I would like to give her a big hug. I think I started to, but I woke up at that point.

  I had other, less well remembered dreams through the night, and sometime they may have interfered with my sleep. It seemed like I was waking up too often in the night - sometimes as little as every hour. The best sleep, even I am sure that featured a dream, was in the last 2 hours of the the night. Maybe a bit more than 2 hours I now realise. I am sure I got up for a pee at about 5am, but went straight back to sleep for just an intended single hour. I woke up again at around 7.30am.

  This morning my mood and feeling have gone through several changes. I felt pretty crappy. Then I didn't, and then I dd again, but not quite as crappy as the second time. I have had depressing and optimistic thoughts, and I have no idea where I am now. One thing that could be depressing, but isn't because I was expecting it, was my blood glucose. It was 9.6mmol/l. That is not dangerously high, although not really acceptable, but also lower than expected.

  Had my blood glucose been higher, and I was expecting a figure above the red line (10.0mmol/l), I would not have had a small bowl of tomato flavour instant noodles, and I would have tried to fast until dinner time (when it would all be repeated when I eat the second Chinese takeaway dinner). I still ought to be very careful about what I eat during the day. I don't think things are so bad that I have to force myself to go out on a grey afternoon. That is good because I don't think I fancy going out today. At the moment it is bright, but there is not enough sunshine to cast a shadow.

  I don't really know what I am going to do today. I don't really have any ideas of what I might like to do. I guess it is going to be one of those days when I just make it up as I go along. One small exception is that I do intent to wash my hair when I have a shower. I have been putting some oil in my right ear because I suspect a build of wax again, and I put in too much oil twice, and a lot of it got on my hair. It may be good for it, but it doesn't feel good.