The latest revision to the weather forecast has not changed a thing compared to the earlier forecast in the screenshot above. It is a simple, although not pleasant, sort of forecast - light clouds followed by dark clouds. The transition is supposed to occur around midday. Once again the temperature will only reach 11° C. Tomorrow will probably be in 2 parts - light cloud, and dry, until 3pm when dark clouds and copious rain may take over. The afternoon temperature could peak at 13° C, but it doesn't seem the sort of day when that will bring much joy.
 
   Yesterday was an odd sort of day. I achieved lots of small, almost but not quite insignificant, things, and one bigger thing. That bigger thing was a shopping trip to Tesco, and the lesser things were little bits of tidying up here and there. Oh, and I am almost forgetting I did a bit of laundry as well.

  Apart from writing this diary, or blog, or whatever it is, and having a shower, the first even of the day was going shopping in Tesco. I thought I had made it before the weather turned murky, but as I said at the very top of the page, it didn't really get murky, although having said that, there were some times when the sun couldn't find a crack in the clouds, but I suppose that is the definition of "sunny spells". It made the walk to and from Tesco fairly pleasant.
  I am not sure why, but one very little thing I did before I went out was to give my collection of shoes a good hard stare, and decide to give my bright orange Vans an airing. I've always found Vans to be perplexing. They seem to be comfortable, but sometimes are not comfortable. Where they are uncomfortable seems to be in different places to other shoes. Maybe it is because they seem wider that they seem a bit more comfortable at the toe end, but somehow are uncomfortable at the heel end. Upon inspecting the 3 or 4 pairs of Vans that I own I noted some damage around the heel, and of course once the damage becomes apparent the discomfort increases, and even more damage is done.

  I had a fairly strict, but unwritten shopping list for Tesco, and I think I got all I intended to get. That included such luxuries as ice cream and oven chips. More frivolous was some frozen pies, and maybe they were as bad for me as expected. I ended up with quite a full shopping bag, plus a fair bit in my rucksack.

  It was not long until (early) lunchtime when I got home, and I started off by cooking two Tesco branded, small steak with craft ale pies. They smelled nice, but they didn't seem to be nice at all. The problem may have been that the top was burnt, while the underside was not cooked enough. I think my mistake was not using the lower slot in my mini oven/grill. I ended up discarding most of the burnt crust from one pie. The other I could scrape off most of the charring.

  I was suspicious about the sugar content of those pies. The information on the packet was not too helpful in that respect. I suspect it hid a fairly modest to high sugar content by only giving a figure for a standardised "per 100gm of product". I didn't check the weight of the pies, and just hoped for the best. It would have been fa more useful if they had given the sugar content for the entire pie, and maybe they did somewhere in the small print, but I didn't see it.

  I did slightly increase my sugar consumption yesterday when I did something I have never done in my life before. To take away the taste of charred pie I opened up one of the tubs of ice cream I had bought. It was made by Oppo, and previous experiments showed that I could eat a whole tub (500 ml ?), and still get a low blood glucose reading the next day. Yesterday I stopped eating it after I had eaten a mere quarter of the tub. I have never done that before.

  Yesterday I came across a picture taken 10 years ago by my friend Kevin using my camera. It was specially posed outside The Catford Ram, and showed me in "sinister mode" - black shirt, white tie, heavy glasses, and black trousers and white shoes. I think it was taken during one of my thinner days.  I wondered if that, or a similar black shirt was still wearable, and it was ! There seemed to be enough slack around my belly to be very comfortable, but I could not do up the top button. Evidently my neck is fatter now than it used to be. I sort of hoped that the tie would disguise the top button being undone, but that caused another problem. I seemed to have forgotten how to tie a tie. Several experiments later I managed to do a fair knot for the tie.

  One interesting thing about the new picture on the left, taken yesterday, was my stomach bulge. It seems higher up than it used to be. Obviously it is fat, but I have a theory, call it a desperate theory if you want, that the bulge is higher because of the damage to muscles when I had my quad heart operation. They cut a petty big hole in my chest to do that operation, and that must have left some muscles weakened or not working properly. It is probably the same reason that causes my assorted chest aches in damp weather, or even just as a result of turning over in bed carelessly. It is also a probable reason why I get short of breath, or at least feel that way, and why I seem to recover from that shortness of breath within seconds when out walking. It feels like I don't have the muscles to fully inflate my chest any more.

  The little tidying up jobs I mentioned doing ranged from sorting out and filing stuff from a pile of paperwork. I started the job a couple of weeks or more ago, and have only spent the odd 15 minutes here and there doing more. One set of paperwork that I gathered together in one place was all the reports of my (usually) yearly retinopathy exams. This is the exam where the back of my eye is photographed to check for diabetic damage. There is no real need to keep these results, but I find it amusing to see the same form letter sent out year after year - "we detected some background retinopathy, but it is not significant to need treatment now, and no need for you to be seen again for another 12 months" (or words to that effect).

  Another little tidying up was to go through a pile of mostly unboxed recordable CDs and DVDs. Maybe half were of stuff that I had already archived on a pair (master and backup) USB hard drives. Many were Linux distributions, and some were really quite old. Most of them can still be downloaded from the internet, but a few were sort of rarities. None were really of much use in this day and age, but from time to time curiosity makes me wonder what such and such used to be like, and I use an old PC to fire up a Linux from ages past. Copying a whole DVD to hard disk takes some time, and there was enough of this work to last several hours.

  Finally it was Star Trek time and dinner time. I think of the three Star Treks I watched yesterday, I only paid attention to two of them. My mind often wandered away to check something on the internet. This was mostly during long commercial breaks, but if I found an interesting news story I felt no urgency to return my attention back to Star Trek. Another small distraction was dinner.

  Once again I used the slow cooker to cook a stew based on half a pack of minced Aberdeen angus beef (from the reduced price shelf). That left the other half of the pack for tonight's dinner. Last night I had it with sprouts. Tonight it will be with shredded cabbage and leek. It was not long after that "stew" that I surprised myself again by eating just another quarter of the tub of ice cream I had first opened after lunch.

  I stayed up to watch both QI and Have I Got News For You last night. While doing so I guzzled three cans of Polish lager. My supply of Polish beers is now down to just 2 or 3 cans. They left me feeling mellow enough to get to sleep quite quickly after I went to bed at about 10pm. On the whole I slept well last night, although I did wake up quite quickly from two dreams when they got close to reality.

  I can't remember anything about the first dream except it involved a pain in my lower leg. It turned out to be cramp, and it was the real world intruding into my dream. I had to leap out of bed and put some weight on my legs for it to go away. The second event was, very fortunately, not actual reality intruding. In this other dream I was having a pee into a toilet bowl in the middle of the room with other people around. It could have been in a pub or something. I very quickly woke up. I did indeed need to pee, but fortunately I hadn't started !

  This morning, despite potential reasons for it to be higher, my blood glucose reading was an unremarkable 8.5mmol/l. That is about my typical average reading. Shame it wasn't a lot lower  like yesterday, but at least I got away with a few luxuries - even if burnt top, and soggy bottom mini pies didn't turn out to be luxurious. Today's luxuries come a bit later.

  In the middle of writing this I have heard from Angela. Today is the day when Angela said she would try and meet me in the pub, but originally with the proviso that it was warm and dry. It seems she has relented on the warm, and considers being dry good enough (mainly because she can't operate an umbrella while using a crutch). I am now very much looking forward to seeing Angela today. She really is off the vodka for now because she has asked to start with a half of Guinness.