There has been some heavy rain, but it seems much lighter as I write this. In fact I am not sure it is still raining. It might just be a short lull in the rain, but the latest revision to the forecast shows the last of the rain at midday. The 11am and midday rain is just shown as light rain. At midday (and also 1pm) the temperature should reach 13° C, and with the possibility of some sunny spells this afternoon, it could almost feel good...for a few hours. Tomorrow could see a few hours or more of rain in the middle of the day, and it will probably be a bit cooler, just 12° C, which admittedly is only one degree cooler than today.

   I seemed to be quite busy yesterday, although I only achieved a few things. It was one of those days where I spent a lot of time waiting for things to happen, although I did do a few very tangible things. Most importantly I finally finished rinsing the bath towel I had started washing a couple of days ago.

  The bath towel was very taxing. It was very heavy when wet, and wringing it out was hard work. I ended up doing it in two shifts. I think I ended up doing about 10 rinses yesterday until the water was almost not soapy, but it still raised a bit of foam at the very end. That 10 rinses came on top of at least 4 rinses the previous day. I feel sure that bath towels pick up extra soap when drying me despite my efforts to rinse myself very thoroughly after a shower. If used for too long before washing it, that soap seems to get deeply embedded in the fibres.

  Another smaller, and easier to complete, job was to wash up all the glasses used during the beer tasting session the previous afternoon/evening. There was other washing up to do as well, and that included the big and heavy ceramic dish in the slow cooker. It had a lot of uneaten dinner in it, and as I proposed when writing yesterday, I tipped it down the toilet. It looked disgusting, like someone had thrown up, but flushed away very easily.

  My main project of the day was to do a fresh install of OSX 10.6 "Snow Leopard" on the iMac 8. I used a Linux application to make a bootable USB thumb drive of the installer, and although slow, it worked perfectly. One thing bothered me, and it was the amount of information Apple seemed to want from me during the installation process. I was far less bothered when I realised it was quite happy to accept very little, or almost no information. That was a plus point over modern versions of Windows. I am told that Windows 11 will not install until you have told Microsoft your inside leg measurement as well as hoards of other personal information.

  Once the install was done I tried to install a few of my favourite applications. I had spent a bit of time tracking down versions that should work on this older mac operating system. A couple installed OK, but most were "not recognised". One big problem is that OSX 10.6 did not have the cryptographic tools for things like https:// web sites. It was time to get back to my main PC, and seek out more information and stuff.

  Apple still make OSX 10.7 available for download, and I got a copy of that, although it is not a full installer, but needs to be used as an upgrade to 10.6. That should be OK, and I think 10.7 is the first version that has the tools for talking to encrypted web sites. I also found that the iMac 8 can use 10.11 "El Capitan", but it needs a RAM upgrade before it will work. I have increased the RAM from just 500MB to 4GB. Once again it was easy to download from Apple as an upgrade rather than a full installer.

  So much of yesterday was just waiting around for things to download, copying useful files to a USB thumb drive for transfer to the iMac, and waiting for stuff to install or fail. Each little thing didn't take long, but a load of little things add up to a lot of time spent doing very little. I must admit that I spent a lot of time preparing stuff that I won't need until the iMac is working how I hope it will work. If it doesn't all will have been wasted, and I'll put Linux back on it.

  I had a novel dinner yesterday. I had found a reduced price pork roll with bacon and apple stuffing in Tesco the last time I went shopping in there. It looked delicious, but what would have put me off buying it was if I had read the instructions on the back. It needed 1 hour and 25 minutes of oven cooking. I had it with the last of a frozen bag of sprouts with pine kernels, a remnant of Xmas past. The sprouts were good, although I would have preferred a bigger portion. The pork was slightly disappointing. It was nice, but the picture on the box made it look nicer than reality.

  I ate my dinner quite early because I was feeling hungry by 5.30pm, and because it was all cooked by then. I ate it while half watching Star Trek: The Original Series, and keeping an eye on some files being transferred to a memory stick. One problem with copying some files was a problem that was my own fault. Linux is case sensitive, so File.mp3 is considered different to file.mp3 - notice one starts with a capital F and the other with a lower case f. A USB memory stick formatted for use on any computer, or in other words, the Windows files system, is not case sensitive, and so won't allow both files to exist together. I had to opt to not copy one of the two files - mostly the same song with different capitalisation in the file name. As each one came up it stopped the copying until I chose to reject one version.

  I can't remember what Star Trek: deep Space Nine was all about, but it looked less interesting that Star Trek:Enterprise, and I watched some, but not all of the latter. Star Trek:Voyager was like most episodes - pretty dull. After that finished I watched "Secrets Of The London Underground" - a repeat, but worth watching again. That was followed by an episode of QI, and it was a fairly good episode.

  Then it was time for bed - except I could go to bed then because I was still copying another 1000+ files to the USB memory stick for ultimate transfer to the iMac, and I had to keep an eye on it. It was getting on for midnight before I got into bed. I didn't bother to try and reading, but went straight into "I hope I fall asleep quickly" mode. It did seem that it would ages to get to sleep, but then suddenly I was asleep.

  I seemed to sleep well for yet another night, although having gone to sleep so late meant that I didn't get my desired full 8 hours of sleep. In fact I barely got 6 hours. I can remember having at least one seemingly long dream, but I've had a big distraction this morning, and that used up the one working brain cell, and all memory, apart from it's basic existence, has now faded away.

  It seems i must have ate with an eye on my blood glucose levels yesterday, although if so it was done on autopilot. I think my lunch was just a lot of rice crackers, some with cheese, and some with thinly sliced German salami. I have already described my dinner. I suspect that dinner had a lot of calories, but evidently it contained very little sugar. This morning I got two good blood glucose readings, and once again one was not bad, but very different to the other two.

  The Contour meter r3ad a very good 6.9mmol/l, and the GlucoRX meter more or less confirmed that with a very similar, but even better, 6.8mmol/l. The Sino Care meter gave a reading of 8.2mmol/l which while good, is obviously wrong when compared to the other two. I really must make a point of stopping the use of that meter in the future, but I still have 100 (I think) test strips to use up. Perhaps I'll just pack it all away at the end of the month, and maybe, just maybe, I might buy another cheap meter to see how that compares. There seems many cheap meters to choose from. I suspect the original patents on the method they all use have now expired, and anybody can knock them out quite cheaply.

  The most important thing today has already happened. The first order I made with Beer Merchants was delivered at just after 9.35am - just a few minutes into the one hour time slot I was forewarned about. I hear a lot of bad things about DPD, but they always seem to deliver my beer in time and in good condition. The second order I made, to use up some reward points (worth about £8) that were about to expire, will probably be delivered on Monday.

 The latest update to the weather forecast says the rain will have stopped by 11am. At the moment it looks so grey and wet that I would be reluctant to go out, but by the time I have showered, and dressed, going out may be a more palatable option. I think I am going to give into peer pressure, and buy a very small Xmas tree to sit on the top beer fridge. I was told, probably by Michael, that Tesco have some 15 inch high plastic Xmas trees with built i fairly lights. That could be suitable, although I am inclined to check Poundstretcher first.

  Later on I may spend a lot of time playing with the iMac trying to get OSX 10.11 "El Capitan" working on it. That will represent the best it can manage, and be good enough to make finding software a lot easier. Hopefully it will be able to play videos recorded on my mobile phone without crashing, and at worse just fail gracefully. Provided I don't get too carried away, there is a tiny chance I might go out to a gig tonight. Chain are playing in The Railway in Blackheath from 9pm tonight. I hate the pub, but it is just a simple 20 to 25 minutes bus ride to get there. If I do go I doubt I will be there later than 10pm !

P.S. I rushed writing this, and made a host of spelling, and grammatical mistakes. I have corrected a few, but I can't be bothered to go through it all with a fine toothed comb to find the other howlers !