Today may not be too bad. It is trying to be sunny as I type this, but that does match the forecast which says only sunny spells until three hours of full sunshine from 11am. The temperature may only peak at 17° C, but that is still pretty good. It all goes wrong at 7pm when it clouds over and starts to rain - maybe the start of another three rainy days. Tonight should still be quite mild, and tomorrow should start at 11° C, but it will only rise to 15° C. From 10am it will probably rain, and the rain may not stop until after 3pm. There could then be a few hours of sunny spells.

  Yesterday was rather a good day. I seemed to achieve stuff I was not sure I could achieve - at least not without causing later problems with things like aching muscles. It was all because it was warm, and mostly sunny. One problem is that the sun is still not high enough in the sky to light up more than a bit of my back garden.

  When I got up I thought I had better have a shower yesterday morning. Later on, before that happened I had a clearer idea of what I might get up to, and realised that a shower would be best done after I had done some physical labour. With that in mind I put some laundry in to soak. I was hoping to get it sun dried on the washing line, but In got distracted by a few things, and I would not finish that laundry, and get it hanging on the line until just before 1pm.
  In terms of getting dried in sunshine, I don't think it made a lot of difference getting it on the line that late. As the picture shows, only a bit of one leg of a pair of lounge pants is actually in sunshine. It's all rather indistinct, but most of the sunshine is hitting the fence behind higher up that the top of the line and the washing hanging on it. It would be many hours before the sun would come around enough to shine directly on much, but not all of the washing.
 I took this picture at approx 4:30pm, and by then half the lounge pants, half the t-shirt, and one pair of underpants are in direct warm sunshine. It was about 6pm when I brought the washing in. By then the sun was too low in the sky to be seen, and it was starting to get dark. (Sunset was officially 6:14pm). Half the legs on the lounge pants, and half the t-shirt, plus one pair of underpants were warm and dry. The other bits were still mildly damp, and I hung them all on the big clothes horse in the front room - which was surprisingly warm from the day's sunshine. I didn't put a fan on, but I expect everything is dry this morning.
  With my washing on the line I had a short rest, and I think I had a small nibble of something, but I knew I did not want to eat much because I had a gruelling task ahead of me. It started with some weeding in the garden, and also pulling up a fair bit of ivy. Last year I thought I had that ivy almost beaten, but it had slowly recovered, and if I had left it, it would be all over the place in a few more months. I know it won't be too long before I needed to rip out more. Unfortunately it is not easy to get to the roots in several places.

  Some of the weeding was to make access to the tree pictured above. To this day I have no idea what sort of tree it is. I left it growing, but as much as I could, heavily pruned, for 5 years hoping it might show a flower, fruit or nut that would help to identify it. Unfortunately, it was getting too hard to prune, and keep below the top of the fence, and so this spring I decided it had to go before it got completely out of control.

  It wasn't too bad to use my big and small shears on it while there were no leaves to get in the way, and I managed to snip off anything thinner than about 3/4 of an inch thick. Soon I was down to just the thicker stuff. It was time to get out, initially, my small saw, and that cut through some branched over an inch thick. It was starting to get hard work, but the worst we yet to come. to saw through the trunk, which I did in two places needed a big saw, much patience, and much hard work.
  The last cut I made was through almost the thickest part of the trunk, and that was a little over 3 inches thick. To make matter worse (I think) it was still green wood with sticky sap that made the sawing harder. One I was through I poured some water over the cut to make the rings clearer. I am not 100% sure how to count tree rings, but there are at least 5 to be clearly seen, and maybe as many as 6. That roughly concurs to my vague memory of it being about 5 years ago when I was determined to keep what was little more than a twig down to less that 8ft high (give or take a bit).
 I ran out of energy when I had cut the stump down to about 3ft high. I expect suckers to grow out all over the stump sooner or later, and I will try and keep cutting them all off. I may also cut another foot or two off the stump some time - about a foot is all I can put in the garden waste bin (although I have got away with at least double that in the past).

  I said I had run out of energy, but that is not quite right. I was definitely getting tired, but I could have pushed myself further, but I didn't think it worth it. I seem to have got away with no bad after effects, no strained muscles, and not really any muscular aches, but I fear I could have all these things if I had pushed myself to the limit. And anyway, I had already done more than I expected, and more than I needed.

  There was no Jodie yesterday - she was otherwise occupied at a sort of small beer festival type thing, but I thought that Michael might like to pop in for a few beers, and that would give me the excuse to have a few beers myself. I may not have had any booze at all otherwise. Before drinking I thought it prudent to have some lunch, although I don't really recall being hungry. I just had some rice crackers with cheese, and a couple of pickle onions. It seemed quite enough.

  The next thing I should have done was to have a shower, but I didn't really fancy one. I did have a quick rub over with a flannel, and sprayed on some deodorant. That and fresh clothes I hoped would be good enough just for entertaining Michael. I sent him a text message, and half hour later he said he would probably be over once he had finished at the care home with his wife.

  The way he worded that reply was like it would almost be a chore to come and have a beer, but he was more than keen once he got here. He brought with him a stack of paperwork about the Council Tax. He is extremely reluctant to do anything on line, but the council makes it hard to to anything with them without being on online. Michael has been trying to get the single occupant discount because his wife now lives in the care home. One bill seemed to show that he (or rather his son) had succeeded, but another bill contradicted that, and a third bill suggested he owed them a lot of money, but they owed him a large rebate, and some how they wanted to be paid before they would pay him back.

   Logically that would subtract one from the other, and bill him for the difference. I am sure that would happen if it was handled by human accountants, but it seems it was a case of "The Computer Says NO".  I am sure the council still has staff in it's finance department who could sort it out, but it seems impossible for Michael to contact them. His other problem is that he can't seem to not leave his wife to be cared for by the care home staff (what some of the huge money he pays to them is surely for). That leaves him no time to go and make a nuisance of himself at the town hall. I suggested he tries to go to the library where the staff will either be able to suggest a better way to contact the council, or sit with him at one of their computers to guide him through it.

  I think Michael got through 4 cans of beer yesterday, but I only got through 3 cans - cans I had permission from Jodie to drink unsupervised ! Mind you, at least one of those cans was quite a strong beers, although it didn't seem to feel strong as I drank it.  Michael left at about 6:30pm - so he had time to get home, put his dinner on, and then settle down to watch Star Trek: Voyager. I had to prepare my dinner then too.

  My dinner was based on two small baked potatoes. They were Cyprus potatoes, and with their thin skin they were not ideal for baking, but once lost under a sea of melted grated cheese they were almost good. I also added a small can of peas to the meal, and they too had some melted cheese on them. It was all hovering in that healthy/not healthy sort of area. It should have been quite big, but it did look quite small on a big dinner plate.

  I might have left it at that, but after a short while I decided I would have a dessert of an apple, and orange, and 5 or 6 small sugar free choc chip cookies. I ate it all while also watching Star Trek: Voyager. There was nothing on that I wanted to watch after that, and from 8pm until about 9pm, maybe 9:30pm, I tried to catch up with a big backlog of technical news from The Register.

  There was one other thing I did yesterday evening. I couldn't recall doing a poo at all any time yesterday, and I was sure I hadn't done much the day before. So I took a couple of laxative tablets. The chances are didn't even need them, and maybe I didn't, but I guess I'll never know. I'm sure that by 10pm I was fast asleep, and I seemed to sleep OK, and possibly woke up slightly less frequently for a pee, but all but the first time I seemed to pee a huge amount. That was worrying in regard to my blood glucose level.

  I do remember some bit of just one dream (or maybe a series of short dreams like chapters of a bigger story). In this dream I was in South Africa. I think it may have been a holiday with one of several South African work mates I have had over the years. I can't remember what happened earlier in the dream, and the first thing I remember was getting a bus or coach to the centre of town where I would get a train back to where I was staying.

  The bus was very small, and weirdly, and also annoyingly, it had longitudinal seats like a tube train instead of more comfortable transverse seats across the width of the bus. Another strange this is that we must have been following an unmarked bus lane because we were travelling inn the centre of the road, and taking priority over other traffic. We never did seem to reach the railway station, and that was assuming I would have recognised it because I had no idea what I was looking for. I think the dream stopped when I woke up to go for a pee.

  I am not sure why I got up when I did because since then I keep thinking I could do with an extra hour in bed. I followed the usual routine of go to the toilet where I had another fairly big pee, and once again failed to have a poo, although this time I did seem to get a hint that things were on their way.  When I weighed myself I found I had put on another 100gm. After the huge gain the day before that 100gm was less than welcome.

  Then it was time to check my blood glucose levels. This time the frequent, and fairly large pees did indicate my blood glucose was quite high, although fortunately still short of the red danger line. The Contour meter gave the worst reading of 9.3mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter, once again, gave the lowest reading, and that was a reasonable 8.5mmol/l. The Sinocare meter was in good agreement with the Contour meter, but gave a very slightly lower reading of 9.2mmol/l. I suspect that the beers, the starchy potato, and the sweet and juicy orange I had modestly late in the evening, were responsible for these high readings.

  It was after breakfast, and I think possibly at the end of my opening paragraph, after the weather stuff, that I went to the toilet, and finally did a small poo. That uncorked the bottle, and it now seems the laxative tablets I took last night have kicked in. I have been for a poo three more times since then, and one time it was quite substantial. I only mention this because I am sure I haven't finished yet, and it is going to dictate my day.

  I am certainly not going out, even to the local shops until I am very certain I will not be caught short. It is possible, although probably not likely, that I may go out to the garden and do more weeding. It is not very bright yet, but it could be sunny before long. The forecast still insists that there will be full sunshine at midday, and that is only half an hour away now. I must admit that the sky doesn't look like we will get and sunny spells, let alone full sunshine.

  Fortunately there are a few odds and ends I can do today, plus some long snoozes - I hope. Just recently I realise that it would be hand to have a Windows XP computer at hand for a few things that are bothersome to try and do using my main Linux PCs. For instance I have a small USB device that is a temperature data logger. It was quite interesting to see charts of the temperature when I was using it for a while - usually using my work PC that was running Windows XP.

  Another thing that I admit is not important in any way, although if I could do it it would be more important. It is to burn Lightscribe discs. These are ordinary recordable CD or DVDs on one side, but have a laser sensitive coating on the other side that a special CD/DVD burner can write on using special software. There used to be Linux software, but it was always a bit troublesome, but now some of the libraries it relies on are depreciated, and the software no longer works.

  The amount of times I would have liked to burn a lightscribe disk in the last couple of years is once, and it was such a low desire that it was not worth the bothers. One of yesterday's short distractions was getting an ancient laptop out from under a pile of dusty stuff, and give it a brief check. The licence label on the bottom said it originally came with Windows 2000, and so must be around 25 years old. However, it still boots into Windows XP, and even still seems to have some life left in it's battery (but I wouldn't like to chance it for more than 10 minutes, maybe even just 5 minutes).

  Today, between snoozes, and probably more visits to the toilet, and reading more technical news on the internet, I will spend an hour or so playing with that old laptop, and maybe using the lightscribe application already on it, to burn a lightscribe disc using an external Lightscribe CD/DVD burner. I will also install the software for the USB temperature logger - which was the start of all this !