Today will be just as sunny as yesterday, and maybe more if the sky stays clear all day, but the wind from the east will make it a cooler day. Just 13° C is predicted, but it should still look really nice. Tomorrow should be another sunny day, but despite the wind, it could be a degree or two warmer.

  Yesterday started out really awful. A combination of almost no sleep, and bad health readings were not a good start, and not a good recipe for the rest of the day. Fortunately I did the right things with regard to my weight and blood glucose, and my blood pressure seemed to correct itself by the end of the day.

  It was useful giving up on trying to sleep yesterday morning, and starting to write about the earliest I have even managed. It meant that I finished writing very early too. As usual I had a short rest after I had finished writing, but no matter how I tried I could not have a snooze. There seemed to be no0 good reason, like pain or discomfort to stop me dozing off, but it just didn't happen.

  I am unsure of the time, but at a guess it was probably not long after 10am when I made a start on one of two things I thought I could do yesterday, and that was washing a pair of jeans. Initially, as usual, I put them in the detergent to soak, and I would come back to them a little later, and it turned out it was only a little later. In the meantime I read some stuff on the internet, and tried to get myself in the correct belief state to fast until dinner time (and for dinner to be slightly frugal) - I really needed to get my blood glucose back in control.

  I think I had those jeans hanging on the washing line before midday, and probably closer to 11:30am. Once again I had a lie down, and failed to have a snooze. Maybe half an hour later I was back in the bathroom hand washing my favourite small bath towel. I was washing it after not that much use because one corner of it started to smell stale. After not using it that much I was surprised how many rinses it took forn the water to run slightly clear (another 8 rinses and maybe it would be crystal clear.
  I took this picture of the freshly washed jeans, and small bath towel at 1:20pm. By this time, some of the jeans were almost starting to feel dry, but only where the sun had hit them. It would be another 4 hours until the sun had come around enough to shine on the top 2/3rds of the towel.
  It is both good and bad that my house faces south. That means the front of the house, including my bedroom, gets the full force of any sunshine. It can get my bedroom very warm. Meanwhile, the north facing dining room can stay really chilly. It also means that my garden gets very little sunshine until the sun is high enough in the sky to shine over the house. I took the picture above at 5:30pm. The sun was then shining along nearly half the length of the washing line, but it was also getting lower and lower in the sky. When the picture was taken, only 2/3rds of the washing is in direct sunshine, and when I brought the washing in, about half an hour later, only half of it was in sunshine. It was still 99% dry though.

  One other thing I originally thought I might do was to go shopping in Tesco. I later thought it would be pointless because the one thing I did not need while trying to fast was more food. I spent the rest of the afternoon reading, and in the later part of teh afternoon I watched a few of my recently edited episodes of The Simpsons. I don't think it was anything I saw while watching, but around 5pm I did slightly give in and eat a very small quantity of peanuts. It might have been more, but there were so few left in the bottom of the bag.

  I watched the 5pm Star Trek: The Original Series episode, albeit with quite a few interruptions. Fortunately I could remember 95% of the story after seeing it so many times in the past, and the interuptions were of no great consequence. At about 5:50pm I went down to the kitchen to prepare the main part of my dinner - two corned beef rolls. The rolls were Ciabatta rolls, and they are so full of big bubbles in the dough that they probably weigh half of a normal roll.

  I ate, and thoroughly enjoyed those rolls while I watched the BBC 6 O'clock news. They were made more enjoyable because they were the first substantial amount I had eaten since breakfast (and breakfast was an unusually small portion), and also enjoyable because the news was so tedious. I would say I wonder why I am watching it again, but the simple answer is that there are no other distractions on TV at the time.

  I did have a dessert after my rolls. It was a small Conference pear, a nectarine, and a semi unripe plum. The pear and nectarine tasted quite sweet, and my have spoiled my chance of getting a really good blood glucose reading this morning. After the news I watched Star Trek: Voyager. It was only a slightly good episode because Captain Janeway didn't appear in it too often. It finished at 8pm. By 8.30pm I had brushed my teeth, gone to bed, and I think I was fast asleep.

  I had no digestion troubles last night, and no odd aches in the chest area. I still needed to get up for a pee every 2 or 3 hours, but I regard it as the best sleep I have had for a long time (actually, I can't quite remember when, but it may have been less than a week ago !). I know I dreamed a lot, but all I can remember is a few disjointed, almost still frames, from maybe half a dozen dreams. One dream seemed to be about a PC or laptop doing something odd, but that is about all I can remember.

  Getting up to pee through the night was definitely a good thing because it meant that after my first pee after getting up (but no poo so far) I had good news when I got on the scales. Yesterday morning it seemed like I had put on a huge amount of weight - almost 2kg ! This morning I seem to have lost a lot of that. I am 1.4kg lighter. I am still a lot heavier than I was a week ago, but there seems to be hope again that I might get back there, and hopefully keep going for a while.

  Yesterday morning my blood glucose was all over the place. Maybe it was because my three blood glucose meters are affected in different ways by blood chemistry, but getting three readings all so very different is not really helpful. This morning things were back to normal. The Contour meter read a fairly good 8.2mmol/l. The GlucoRX meter read and even better, but not too different, 7.9mmol/l. The Sinocare meter was a bit different with a higher reading of 8.8mmol/l. The average of all three readings was good enough, although lower would always be better.

  One thing about yesterday morning, and even into the early afternoon, was that my blood pressure was a lot higher than usual. One reading showed "Mild Hypertension" but most readings were "High Normal". Sometime in the late afternoon my blood pressure began to return to something closer to my normal. This morning my blood pressure is very slightly higher than normal. It was 110/44. My average for previous months is around 108/48. That makes this morning so close that it is nothing to really remark on.

  There are two things I want to achieve today, with a third thing an unlikely possibility. I have saved up three white t-shirts, that need to be washed separately from my usual black t-shirts. I want to try and wash them today. I think that today a shopping trip is still not essential, but would still be a good idea. When I have done that, and the t-shirts are drying in the sunshine, and if I have any energy left, I may go for a walk in the park. If I do go out, I may try and beat my last record of an average of 1.6 mph when walking to Ladywell and back. I don't think I even hold out much hope of even going out again once I have done my shopping.