Today promises to be even warmer with the temperature hitting 15° C for most of the afternoon. There should be very little wind, and that 15° C could feel very warm in the sunshine. Tomorrow should be very similar to today, but it will be a little cooler tonight, and so tomorrow may start at 8° C, but even that is not too bad.

  Yesterday was a good day until it became bad, and it was mostly my own fault. I had a little run in with indigestion, but I will explain that, as best I can, a bit later. It was also a mostly a lazy day, but I did go out to get some shopping, and I did finally wash up every last item that had been waiting for me in the kitchen sink !

  I can't seem to remember what I did yesterday morning in any detail. That may sound odd, or even sinister, but the simpler explanation is that I didn't do anything worth remembering. I do remember that after taking some time to finish writing, and then having a lazy rest afterwards, it was possibly just gone midday when I decided I really ought to have a shower.

  Once I had showered everything seemed to happen in a rush. It felt like I had little time to go out shopping, but I definitely needed to get some stuff from Tesco. I had a fairly pleasant walk there - with no coat, and bare arms. Apart from a few specific items, it seemed like there was not a lot I was going to buy, but of course I was mistaken. I found a few things on the reduced price shelf that I couldn't resist. It included a ready to eat roasted half chicken, and a ready meal of liver and bacon.

  One of the things I was intending to buy was another 4 pack of Ciabatta rolls. They seem to be 70% air, and so they must be safe because..errr.....something. I also bought some pannini rolls. I don't really anything about them, but they looked interesting. The (hopefully) most interesting buy was two bottles of lime flavour Coke Zero. I really liked the lime diet coke when it was available, but I have never been a fan of Coke Zero. It ticks the big box of being sugar free, but there is something that make me feel it is not so good.

  After passing through the checkout I did the first test of my repaired rucksack. As I mentioned recently, the zipper had come off the end of the zip, and it seemed almost impossible to get it back on, but I managed it last Sunday, and sealed the dodgy end with hot melt glue. I am happy to say that has restored it to full working order, and, fingers crossed, it should last for a few more years.

  The walk back home in the warm sunshine was quite nice, although my shopping did slow me up a bit, and it was very nice to stop for a minute to chat with the postman. That almost reset some discomforts back to zero. It was still nice to get home - as always no matter what the reason. It was soon after that I made my first mistake when I prepared some lunch. The problem was the new bread rolls I had bought.

  With 4 Ciabatta rolls, and 4 Pannini roll in my new shopping I felt I may as well finish up the last two tiger finger rolls I had bought from Aldi around a week ago. Not only is their sugar content a bit higher than desirable, but they are very doughy, and quite filling. I filled the two with beef and horseradish sauce, and one of them with aromatic baby leaf salad leaves, and the other with sliced pickled gherkin. The latter was fairly nice, but the salad leaves were nicer.

  As I chomped my way through the second roll I became aware that I was starting to feel stuffed. That was not good, and it also seemed rather unusual. The worst of it would be a little later, and maybe also contribute to worse feelings later. Soon after eating I was distracted by the need to do the washing up that had been sitting in the sink for a few days, and also to give the kitchen work surfaces, and the some of the dining room table, a good wipe down.

  I could finally relax for a bit, and it would be over an hour before Jodie arrived for some beer tasting. She did send me a message to say she was running late, but expected to be here by 3.45pm. I resisted starting a beer on my own until she was here, and spent some of the time reading stuff on the internet. However, I did give in just before she arrived, but I think I had just opened the bottle when she rung my doorbell.

  When I started to drink some beer I was very aware that I still felt stuffed from my earlier rolls. I would have expected them to have moved on in my digestive system by then, but apparently not. Towards the end of my first bottle of beer I realised I had to slow down, and not race ahead of Jodie because I was feeling uncomfortable with hints that it could end up as a vomit situation. Fortunately that never happened, and more beer seemed to help to flush the rolls down.

  Michael joined us earlier than usual, and he was in his now usual stressed situation. He never really said what the trouble was, but he hinted that his now bedridden wife had shit her bed, and maybe more than once. I am unsure if she refuses to call for assistance - as she should be able to living in a care home. It is odd that Michael has zero trust of the carers, and yet says it is a very nice place. The two facts don't seem to agree in my mind.

  After a few beers, Michael seemed to relax a bit, and start to almost enjoy himself. He was obviously still stressed because we didn't have the usual argument about musical tastes. Jodie left to get a bus to Bromley at about 6.30pm, and Michael left very soon afterwards. By that time I was feeling generally OK, and somehow not even drunk. I seemed quiye happy to wash all the glasses we had used, and to wash up a few other bits of cutlery that Jodie had used while my dinner cooked.

  The dinner I had decided on could have been eaten cold, but ready cooked chicken always tastes a lot better if given a 20 minute session in the oven. I should have cooked some simple vegetables to go with that chicken but it seemed like half a chicken would leave little room for vegetables. That was probably the case, but when I mentally compared how I remembered the uneaten half chicken with the pile of bones left on my plate, it was the case that the edible bit was far smaller than it might appear.

  I don't recall feeling particularly stuffed after eating my dinner, and I seemed to be mostly comfortable while sitting up watching TV.  At 9pm I headed to bed expecting to get to sleep very quickly. I didn't  - by an extreme amount ! I did feel some indigestion when I laid down, but it didn't seem bad enough to stop me sleeping - particularly when the effects of the booze made me feel extra sleepy - or should have done.

  The strange thing is that for several hours I hardly seemed to feel sleepy at all. In such situations I have learned not to fight it in bed, but to try and do something useful - usually sitting at my PC and "surfing the net" (as they used to say in primitive times). Mostly I was going through a backlog of news stories from The Register. As I think I probably remarked yesterday, some of it is very dry reading these days since they re-located to America, and spend far more time reporting on corporate affairs - America being the home of evil corporations.

  Some stuff is still worth reading, and particularly their coverage of space related stuff. They do give more depth to stories that appear as very brief notes in daily papers, and often are not covered at all. I think it was gone 3am before I started getting any sleep, but the time leading up to that was actually productive. I think it was 2am that I went out to the toilet and did a poo. The generally mild night (about 11° C) meant that is was almost comfortable to sit in the unheated bathroom.

  An even better use of that time was to do a real test of the never before used thermostat on my fan heater. In the past it seemed like if the thermostat ever switched off the heater, it would never come back on again until there were icicles hanging off the heater. It seems I was probably not patient enough, or maybe it was only because of the mild night, but last night/very early this morning, I turned the thermostat carefully until it just clicked off. It may have taken an hour before it turned back on, and by then it was only just starting to feel a bit cool. Maybe an hour passed before it switched off again.

  This, provided it is reliable, is good news, and very annoying news that I never tried to trust it months ago, proably years ago. Last night it would have halved my electric heating bill. I never measured it, but it did seem to be almost doing an hour on followed by an hour off. It will still be another month or more until it is comfortable enough to not need any heating at night, but I will try to use the thermostat until I can put the heater away until next autumn - when I hope I can remember to keep using the thermostat.

  Even after getting to sleep I still had a period of insomnia around 5am, but after a while I got back to sleep, and it was just after 8am when I finally got up. I needed a pee, and I also needed a poo. Later on I would have another poo, and thankfully that was before I ate my breakfast. After the second poo, and a bit more pee, I weighed myself again. It was still not good news, but slightly better. It seems all the beer and indulgences meant I put on 300gm yesterday.

  My blood glucose did not fare well either, but at least two of my blood glucose meters gave grudgingly OK readings. The Contour meter read 8.9mmol/l, and the GlucoRX meter read exactly the same. That just nudges under the line when I put the readings into the pink zone on my spreadsheet of results. Sadly the Sinocare meter did slip into the pink zone with a reading of 9.5mmol/l. That is very bad, but still just short of a disaster.

  My blood pressure may be up a little bit this morning, but it may be that it is just because I am using my spare wrist mounted meter. I was demonstrating my usual wrist mounted meter downstairs yesterday, and i accidently left it on the dining room table, slightly tucked away to keep it away from beer. My spare meter sometimes agrees with the other, and sometimes not - for reasons I can't guess at. Today's reading, using the spare meter, was 115/53, and while that looks a lot higher, I think it still in the "Optimum" range.

  Today I am in a quandary. I would very much like to go out and frolic in the warm sunshine, but there are two reasons, one rather more believable than the other, why I probably won't. The first is that after being away over half the night I don't really feel like going out. I would rather lay on my bed reading and snoozing. The other reason is because I do have to go out. I need to go to the pharmacy to see if they have the drugs that were missing from my repeat prescription. While I am there I may as well go around the corner to Aldi and get a few things - things like ordinary Diet Coke, and some frozen and canned food. The larder section of my new fridge is already very full, but there is room for some emergency use frozen meals. After that extended walk I usually feel I have walked quite far enough for one day, but I suppose it could happen that I go out again.