Today should almost be a repeat of yesterday's weather, but with one useful difference. Today started off several degrees warmer, and so it should warm up to the predicted high of 14° C earlier. It is worth noting that The met Office predict a high of 16° C today ! Now that would definitely feel nice and warm ! The temperature is not going to fall much tonight despite the sky staying clear for a lot of the night, but it will start to get cloudy before sunrise tomorrow. It should mean that tomorrow could start at 11° C, but that same cloud will mean mostly sunny spells instead of sunshine, and the afternoon high will still only be 14° C. Saturday and Sunday may see clear skies again, and the temperature maybe peaking at 15° C.

  In terms of the weather, yesterday was a splendid day, but there were a few non weather things that spoiled the day a bit - mostly the current state of my health, but even that caused both good and bad results. One of the great things was being able to get out into the sunshine with bare arms. After just a few exposures they are looking less pasty now.

   Yesterday, being a Wednesday, it was my usually regular visit to The Jolly Farmers for a couple of pints of Guinness. That meant reducing any lazing around so I had time to have a shower, and get dressed in time to get out to catch my usual train to Ladywell, with 2 copies of The Metro tucked into a pocket. Maybe I didn't start early enough, or maybe I was too slow washing and getting ready because I got to the station later than intended.

  After the discomfort of walking in what were once my best walking boots, the day before, I chose a plain pair of cheap trainers, and my walk was much more comfortable, but only in respect of my actual feet. My ankles were complaining by the time I got to the station. It is hard to judge it by hindsight, but I think I was probably walking at about my usual walking speed for a lot of the way to the station, although I did try and walk slower, and mostly failed.

  When I reached the station I felt very slightly out of breath, but I don't think I felt any angina pains. I only seemed to need to rest for maybe half a minute before I felt OK to go up and over the footbridge. Usually that would just tip me over the edge, but yesterday I didn't feel too bad at all. There could be a reason for that, and I know what it probably was. It all started when I had a very bad night with chest pains that didn't always seem to be heartburn.

  The next morning I decided to resume taking Clopidogrel - a blood thinning drug I was prescribed after a stay in hospital a few years ago. (Maybe 2019 ?). It was only supposed to be prescribed for 12 months, but it always appeared on my repeat prescriptions until I queried it after several years, and then the prescriptions stopped. I still had a box and a half of the pills, and now I have self prescribed them again for a week or two to see if it improves things, and it does seem to have done so. I will let the cardiologist know about this experiment, and maybe others for short periods, when I see him next October.

  My 12:34 train was running late for some reason, and so I had plenty of time to stand on the platform soaking up the sunshine. That felt good ! What was less good was the angle of the sun at this time of year. It is still a bit low in the sky and can be dazzling. Worse than that is that its seems to match the angle of the windscreens of many train, and that causes a nasty glare when photographing them.
  I took several pictures of trains while travelling to the pub, and most were pretty poor quality. Half of the photos were taken looking towards the sun, and that mean that the front (or back) of the train was in deep shadow surrounded by a lot of glare. In the picture above the sun is bouncing off the windshield causing a bare glare. I must admit that in the small camera LCD viewfinder the effect looked a lot worse. Fortunately none of the photos would have been of a train I had not photographed before.

  When I got to the pub there were three people at the end of the bar making enough noise for the whole of the pub - the rest of which was very quiet with maybe only 4 or 5 of us there. I think all the strong sunshine had put everyone in a good mood, and it did seem to be one of the better sessions in there. Even the quick crossword seemed easy to do, although I have to confess I cheated by looking up two answers. I am just not terribly familiar with movie and TV stars.

  I had less luck with the cryptic crossword, but I did manage to solve a few clues, and two of them were of the longest words. Some of the four letter answers just did not come to me. After a happy two pints it was time to leave. I must admit I was expecting Kevin, or anyone else I might know to join me on the very day when I needed to walk to the pharmacy to pick up my next repeat prescription.

  I was not looking forward to the walk to the pharmacy because I know it is a little bit further than my comfortable range. If I were walking home through the park I could stop every now and then to take a picture, but it somehow feels awkward to do that when walking down the main road. I tried to walk slowly, and to some extent I did manage to, but that seemed to prolong the discomfort from my ankles, and to a less extent my knees and even hips.

  As I neared the pharmacy I began to notice my aching ankles less and less at the price of the start of angina like pains, and a sort of breathlessness that isn't actually that - I feel the need to breath faster or more deeply, but it is not quite the same as being genuinely breathless. I did take one 15 second break when about one minute away from the pharmacy, and it was good to have a breather while in the pharmacy.

 I noticed only one of the good staff seemed to be working when I got to the pharmacy. The other two blokes seem a bit vacant despite at least one of them being the registered pharmacist, but I wouldn't trust him to tend a broken nail. Fortunately the good assistant, Monica, is always on her toes and instantly intercepted when the vacant looking bloke seemed to take too long to process that idea that I was there to pick up my repeat prescription.

  I think Monica (or maybe Monika) didn't even have to know my name. She knew me by sight, and quickly handed over my bag of drugs, but had to apologise that there were out of two of my drugs. Although all are important, two are of particular importance, and it was those two they didn't have. One was just simple low dosage aspirin tablets, and the other was Mononitrate Isorbide - but instrumental for helping to control my angina. It was suggested I check there on Friday to see if new supplies have arrived.

  I guess I was in and out of then pharmacy in two or three minutes, and that was not enough time to really 100% reset my aches and pains. I was too distracted by simmering angina pains to notice too much of any ankle aches. I say "simmering" because I could feel the tightness of my chest, for most of the 5 or 6 minute walk to home, but fortunately is didn't seem to spread out to my arms as it might have done. It was really nice to finally get home, and once home I was back in a generally painless state after 5 minutes.

  One oddity when I got home was that I did and didn't feel hungry. Maybe I was just looking forward to lunch more than I needed it. I still had lunch. It was two Ciabatta rolls with corned beef, horseradish, and aromatic baby salad leaves. They were very delicious, and I decided I had definitely wanted them. In a curious, undefined way, I felt physically better for eating them, as well as psychologically satisfied.

  I was expecting to have an afternoon snooze, but somehow time seemed to slip away before I could have one. I obviously spent a short amount of time eating my two rolls. It was another short time putting my camera battery on charge, and transferring the pictures I had taken to my PC. It was a short piece of time to quickly check that I did not need any of the pictures except the one used to show how much glare there was from the bright sun hitting the train windshield.

  All these little things, plus checking my new drugs, and stacking the boxes up, all seemed to add up to a lot of time. It didn't take me as far as dinner time - that was still a good hour away when I had a small snack of a handful of peanuts. I also had about half an hour laying on my bed reading a half a dozen pages, and than failing to have a snooze. Then it was time to prepare my dinner so I could eat it while watching the BBC news at 6 O'clock.

  My dinner was weird, and not nearly as nice as I hoped. In fact it was very disappointing. I think my original idea was to have just fruit, with maybe a bit of cheese, for my dinner, but I later decided I wanted something meaty. I have some diced beef in the fridge that I could have used for a stew if I had started many hours earlier. What I did have that needed little time, and most of it in the oven with the timer set, was some beef burgers.

  I had the brilliant idea that I could serve the burgers on a bed a refried beans. I had a bought a can of refried beans from Aldi a week or two ago, and I was curious to see what they were like. I knew they would probably be different to ones I had tried ages ago because their sugar content was a lot lower than expected. It turned out they were close to horrible. Instead of something like mushed up beans they were more like a cumin flavoured muddy slurry. I shan't be buying any more of that make !

  It was probably lucky, or maybe unlucky, that I put a couple of slices of cheese on the burgers, and melted it, while also heating the refried beans in the microwave. If I hadn't added the cheese I might have washed the slurry off the burgers, and dried them off in the oven before eating them in bread rolls. The worst thing is that for a couple of hours after eating dinner any burp seemed like I was about to vomit up those horrid refried beans.

  It seemed like it had been a long day, and after TV to 9pm I felt like I wanted to get to sleep as quickly as possible. I brushed my teeth, got in bed, turned out the light, and.....nothing ! I suddenly felt wide awake. After laying in bed trying to force myself to sleep I gave in and got up again. I sat at my PC, and read more news from The Register. Once upon a time that website was all about computer and science news, but since moving their headquarters to America (possibly under new owners) it has been badly infected with America corporate ethics (or lack of them) and now about half of it all is about the financial goings on in the technical world. Shame really. So much of it is very dry reading these days.

  I lost track of time, but I think I was back in bed, and fast asleep before midnight. I am unsure if I slept all that well because I seemed to be dreaming a lot last night. That is not to say I remember much from those dreams. In fact there was one dream that I thought would be good to describe this morning, but it seems I have left it too long, and now I can't seem to remember a thing about it.

  My instinct was that I had been careful enough about keeping my sugar intake low, but I had probably overdone the calories a bit. This turned out to be correct. After getting up I went for my first pee, and I also passed quite a significant quantity of poo ! When I got on the scales afterwards I seemed to have put on 100gm in the last 24 hours. As I remarked yesterday when I seemed to have lost 100gm, that is such a small amount that it could be plus or minus that amount almost depending on which way the wind was blowing.

  My instinct about my sugar consumption was sort of right. All three meters gave satisfactory readings - nothing to cheer about, but nothing to be miserable about. The Contour meter read 8.4mmol/l, and that was just under my old target of 8.5mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter was actually quite good at just 8.1mmol/l. The Sinocare meter read the highest, as it often does, but only 8.6mmol/l.

 My blood pressure initially seemed to be a bit high just now, but that was when I was feeling like another poo was coming on, and so I didn't dare relax in case the wrong muscles relaxed !! Having now been to the toilet, and it seems possible last nights refried beans are really doing their stuff, I felt much more relaxed. My blood pressure after that was just 109/47. That is very good, but I can get it lower on many days.

  The chance of getting better health readings tomorrow seems slim for two reasons. I think I should have enough time to go shopping around lunchtime, and that always brings temptations - and some are more obvious that some. To help lubricate those temptations it is a Thursday, and this afternoon should see a beer tasting session with Jodie, and probably Michael.