It is bright and sunny now, but the latest revision to the Met Office forecast has taken away quite a few hours (actually 3 and 4pm so far) of sunny spells in favour of light cloud. The BBC forecast continues to show sunny spells all day except for 7pm when full sunshine is shown ! Today has started mild, and it should reach a comfortable 16° C for most of the afternoon. Tomorrow afternoon currently shows a 30 to 40% chance of light rain after a dry, but cloudy morning. The afternoon should still warm up to  16° C, but maybe for as little as a single hour.

   Yesterday was one of those days that had plenty of potential to be a great day, but it was never realised the way intended, but it was still a fairly pleasant day. Having said that I can think of one thing that was not so great. Let me explain.

  I got to a very slow start yesterday, and there were delays as I edited some of the pictures I showed yesterday. I had quite a lot to say about the day before, and ended up writing 2,822 words about it, plus about my night, and some notes on yesterday morning, plus describing the pictures. The grand consequence of it all was that it was midday before I had finally uploaded the last of it to this web site.

  After spending almost the entire morning behind my keyboard I deserved a rest, and I had it by laying on my bed quietly reading.....until I had a snooze that took me up 1pm. By then the best of the sunny spells, which were not exactly that wonderful, seemed like they were over, and it seemed to become a bit dull outside. It was still warm outside, but my desire to attempt a walk of at least a full mile, and with a potential target of 3 miles, dwindled down to nothing.

  I had to think of new ways to pass the time. One was to connect a proper monitor to my old display (because my large screen TV shows a really terrible picture - as many older wide screen sets did), and then to do some more copying of old mini-DV tapes to computer video files. The first I did was some footage taken while visiting the Bedford to Bletchley railway line on 4th October 2002.

  Back in those days the battery life of the Samsung camcorder I was using was probably only an hour or two. A consequence of that is that I only used to use it sparingly, and would have it fully turned off until I was sure I wanted to use it. The outcome of that is that I would often miss something I realised I wanted to video at the last moment. These days I am well aware that standard practice is to shoot maybe 5 times more than you hope to use after editing it down.

  My 20 to 30 minutes of video might edit down to just a few minutes, and that is a bit of a shame. We (Kevin and myself) should have better planned that trip to make better use of the camcorder by doing things like getting off at more stations and exploring a bit. I guess that in reality I shot enough for it to be nostalgic, but I doubt it could ever be called entertaining. I will edit it down as savagely as needed to make it less boring, and perhaps I'll end up with maybe 5 minutes that Kevin may be able to watch without getting bored.

  After transferring that tape from camcorder to PC, and then from Windows PC to my main PC, I decided to do another tape. This one had 28 minutes of video taken on a visit to the Marsh Link Line (Ashford International to Eastbourne, but only as far as Rye). Much of it was filmed outside the train window, and most of it is just views of fields or the track ahead. Once again it was far from stunning stuff, and once again I will probably edit it down to just 3 or 4 minutes.

  One little conundrum is that the finished video file for that tape to video transfer came out to be 10GB !!! The hard disk on my old PC is probably formatted as ExFAT - a windows hard disk format that can accept files of that huge size, but the 256GB thumb drive I was going to use to transport that huge video file from old to new PC choked on it. I didn't do it yesterday, but maybe today I will probably format a spare thumb drive, or even a portable hard disk while it is connected to that Windows XP computer. I hope that will work OK.

  I think it was around 2pm that I stopped for lunch. I know I had a salami sandwich using sun dried tomato flavour hummus as if it were butter. I think I also had some sugar free biscuits as well. With hindsight, I am wondering if that hummus might have contained more sugar than the none I had hoped for. I think the bulk of the sugar I had was in the Korean inspired, marinated pork belly strips I had for dinner.

  I knew that they contained a lot of sugar - all from the marinade. I mentioned this the day I bought them from Tesco earlier in the week. At the time I said I would have to split the 6 strips into at least two meals of three each. I didn't. I ate the whole lot because I thought they may have been delicious. Sadly they were a notch down from "delicious", and it wasn't helped by overcooking them. They were a little dry, a bit less succulent....and then I had them with dry, boiled potatoes.

  I spent a lot of my evening watching the Saturday back to back episodes of The Avengers. I must admit I didn't watch every episode because they were all ones shown individually during the week, and I had watched 1 or 2 of them. I mostly filled in the gaps (and the adverts) by reading stuff on the internet. The last episode of The Avengers finished at 9pm, and as usual, I went to bed to read for a while before trying for sleep.

  Last night I seemed to get to sleep very easily, and seemed to sleep very soundly. I can only remember waking up twice in the night, and both times I went for a pee, but one of those times I barely needed to go. I think it was around 4am that turned on my heater, just on low, on my way to the toilet. I next woke at just gone 6am. It felt too early to get up, and I tried to go back to sleep. I think I did get some sleep, but the next time I checked the clock it was 6.45am, and I decided to get up at that time.

  My sleep didn't seem to feature much dreaming, but I do remember something about just one dream, probably from during my last hour of sleep. It was another of the dreams where I was back at work, or maybe not have retired, but still getting paid my two pensions. I think the reason I have these themed dreams because having an independent income gave me a huge sense of power.

   I could walk out of the job at a moments notice, and still easily survive. I almost wish I had actually done that because one more income can only be good. In the dream I was back in an approximation of the job where I was repairing TVs. In the dream (and in real life) I was often nagged that I didn't work fast enough. That was true, but I got a lot of support from the engineering side because I was very thorough with my fault finding, and I probably did the cheapest repairs in the place when termed in the cost of the replacement parts, plus it was very rare that one of my repairs would come back with the fault not completely cured.

  In the dream I was offered some sort of sideways move to a different function, but that would be to a lower grade, which was lower paid. I insisted I maintain my current pay. I said I didn't mind a less prestigious job, but I would not lose any money from it. I was reluctant to lose that extra money, but I was going to stick to my guns, and not give in. I didn't think of it in the dream, but in real life I could have sued for "constructive dismissal" if I was forced to resign. I think I woke up before the situation was resolved.

  This morning my eating choices, which also included a small and two medium sized blood oranges (or red oranges as they prefer to market them as these days) I had for a dessert after that slightly dry, but still slightly greasy pork belly slices, all had a bad impact on my blood glucose. The Contour meter insisted, even after a second reading, to put my blood glucose as high as 9.0mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter read a lot lower, and insisted my blood glucose was just 8.0mmol/l. That would be closer to what I would have wished for. The Sinocare meter unusually gave a fairly low reading of 8.2mmol/l. Quite why two readings on the Contour meter were so high is another mystery.

  As far as I can remember, if there are trains running today, which there are, Jodie will be over for some beers this afternoon. before that I need to go to Tesco for a few things. I don't think I can give any more predictions about my day at the current time.
      







1700 words today