It is a very grey morning again, although I think the starting temperature was closer to 7° C than the forecast 5° C, Maybe we will start seeing the sun break through the clouds around midday, and from 4pm we may see full on sunshine until sunset. The afternoon should warm up to 16° C. Tomorrow could see the very welcome return to all day sunshine, and the temperature should/could reach a very warm 21° C. The day after could be similar, but from Sunday onwards it will be cold, dull and wet again.

   Yesterday could have been another very depressing day, but it was only mildly depressing. There were a few good things, and I did one job that I had been putting off for ages. That rather pleased me, but with that done I didn't do much at all. The mid afternoon sunshine was quite cheery, but sort of wasted.

  After I finished writing I had my usual lie down. I managed to rouse myself to action early enough to have a wet shave, wash and condition my hair, and have a shower. In theory I was in plenty of time to get dressed, and get to the station without rushing, and in plenty of time to get my usual 12:34 train to Ladywell. The only trouble was that things were in motion....

  By things being in motion I am actually referring to my guts. I mentioned yesterday that I had taken a laxative tablet the night before. It was actually after I had got up from my lie down, and before I had my shower, that laxative tablet did it's business.....and it did it in spades (or some other gruesome description). That was fine....up to a point. I seemed empty, but after I had finished my hair washing and shower, and had dried my hair I began to feel that maybe I was not entirely empty.

  It turned out that I was not empty, and ended up having another small at about the time I might have been getting my train, but I expected as such, and decided I was not brave enough to go try going out.  I laid down and ended up having another short, or at least I think it was a short snooze. Prior to having my wet shave I trimmed my beard, but my beard trimmer seemed to have very low batteries despite only recently coming off the charger.

  With nothing else to do I decided it was definitely time to fit the two new AAA rechargeable batteries I had bought for my beard trimmer weeks ago. I seemed to find it a bit tricky re-assembling the trimmer after I had soldered in the new batteries, but after some fiddly about it all clicked into place. The new batteries had some charge, but the motor seemed fairly slow. After I had put the trimmer on charge for a couple of hours the motor sounded like a dentists drill ! It hasn't sounded like that for maybe 10 or 15 years.

  The next thing I was going to do was to play with an ancient laptop that has Windows XP still installed and working on it. I particularly wanted to install one bit of software on it. It was the software for a USB dongle with a temperature logger in it.  Over the years I have never found a way of using that dongle on my main Linux PC. I must admit that I have no pressing need for a temperature logger, but it can be interesting, and using it is better than just letting the device go to waste.

  I did the beard trimmer battery change in the dining room, and it is always cold in there even when the front of the house is nice and warm. Yesterday there was no sunshine to speak of while I was working, and I was reluctant to waste electricity to warm the room. By the time I had done the battery change I was feeling quite chilly, and in that state I had no desire to stay down there any longer to play with the laptop on the only easy to use space of the dining table.

  From then on I did nothing but read and eat. The reading was the Philip K. Dick Book "Radio Free Albemuth". It was hard going to reach the end, and now having finished it I am not sure whether it was good, bad or even terrible. One aspect that was sort of interesting was that it was set in (when it was written in 1976) about a dystopian future where America's president sounded a lot like America's present day Donald Trump, even down to being what many predict could be Trump's future - an absolute dictator !

  The next Philip K. Dick book I am reading is "The Preserving Machine". It is a collection of short stories which includes the story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale". That is the story that was very loosely used as the basis for the film Total Recall. It could be interesting reading that particular story to see if it shares more than the names of a few characters in the movie. One oddity is that I can't recall ever reading any of the only two Philip K. Dick books on my bookshelf. I strongly suspect that I started one or the other and found it boring or too dense to enjoy.

  On the subject of eating, I tried to be careful again about what I ate without being pedantically careful. In other words I just sort of chose stuff on autopilot again that was mostly safe. My lunch, although seeming to be modestly big was still possibly not to bad for me. It was two Paninni rolls with corned beef and aromatic salad leaves. Those two rolls were very like the Ciabatta rolls I have been having recently - they are full of huge air bubbles and so very light. I haven't actually checked their sugar content, but I hope it is actually low.

  Despite being so light and airy, they seemed filling enough that I don't think I had an afternoon snack....but maybe I did have something. I can't think what it could be. Maybe I am mistaking course one of my dinner. I guess I did have it a bit earlier than my usual dinner time. It was a Korean inspired salad, and it was a rather basic salad that included a lot of grated carrot, plus some crunchy things and a flavoured dressing.
  It's sugar content was just 3.5gm, and that seemed quite low. Tomorrow I ought to eat a similar salad that is an "Indian Style" salad (if such a thing exists). It is also part of some new stuff in Aldi.
  I had the salad very soon after 5pm. Almost an hour later I had part two - some fruit and some biscuits.  The biscuits are sugar free digestive biscuits, and I ate them to try and balance the acid taste of the fruit. It sort of worked, but I think it gave the red apple a slightly odd taste, but I don't really like these apples. It was the last from a pack of 6 that I have had hanging around over a week. I think their apple variety was described as "Cameo" (or something like that).

  The Golden Delicious apple was very nice, and did seem to go well with the biscuits. The two small oranges were from a bag described as "wonky easy peelers". Both were definitely not easy to peel ! One was a lot nicer than the other. After another half hour, actually when the BBC was changing from the national news to the local news, I went down to the kitchen to get a very naughty part three of my dinner.

  It was ice cream again. This is getting to be a very bad habit. It was plain vanilla "soft scoop" ice cream from Aldi. It's sugar content per scoop is not that high - just slightly too high to get good blood glucose readings in the morning, but (hopefully) not so bad as to get terrible readings. One sort of good thing is that an Aldi scoop is described as 45 grams, as opposed to a Tesco scoop which is only 42 grams. I took advantage of that by having an extra dessert spoonful.

  I watched a few things on TV, including The BBC 6 O' clock news, but there was not much TV entertainment on last night, and I ended up catching up on other news and stuff on the internet for maybe an hour or so. I went to bed a little after 9pm, and read until gone 10pm. I was reading the first short story, maybe 6 or 7 pages long, of Philip K. Dick's "The Preserving Machine", and the short story was actually The Preserving Machine.

  Back in 1953, when the story was written, it must have seemed like very exciting science fiction, but reality has, theoretically, overtaken it. The machine itself was (to the reader) a black box in which you inserted a musical score, and what to day we would know as having the information in the music score encoded in DNA. The machine would produce an animal that had the music stored in it's genes. In 1953 it had only just been confirmed that the genes were encoded into dna, but the fine details, including the structure of DNA were only discovered much later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_molecular_biology . In the modern/current world, storing data in DNA has been achieved - in a test tube, and even then not a lot of data.

  I think it was about 10:15pm when I turned out the light, and I seemed to fall asleep very quickly. Once again I seemed asleep rather well if the breaks in sleep to have a pee don't count. It was actually another night where I didn't seem to wake as frequently for a pee, but that did mean that on at least one occasion it felt like I could fill a bucket ! I can't remember a single thing about any dreams, although I seem to have a feeling that most dreams may have been short, and all based on a common background - maybe foreground as well.

  I woke up at about 6:30am, and it was that undefined waking up where you know it is time to get up. That was another time when I went to the toilet, and although I hadn't felt any significant discomfort beforehand, I seemed to want to pee gallons. At that time I did not have a poo, but I did after I had sorted out my pills/drugs/vitamins and stuff for the day. After that I did have a poo, and passed a bit more pee. When I got on the scales I found I had seemed to have lost 200gm since yesterday.

  When I checked my blood glucose I had a feeling it would not be as low as the day(s) before, and that was mainly based on something like guilt after eating the ice cream last night. The Contour meter read 8.8mmol/l, and that is sort of OK, but higher than desirable. The GlucoRX meter read a fraction lower at 8.7mmol/l. The Sinocare meter did it's usual - it read a lot higher. I think it was just over 10.0mmol/l. That is well over the red line, and so I tried again using fresh blood from a different finger. That brought the reading down to 9.1mmol/l. That crosses the threshold to NOT OK, but at least it is under that red line at 10.0mmol/l where bad things start to happen.

  Today I have an excellent chance of ruining my blood glucose and weight. This afternoon should be a beer drinking/tasting session with Jodie, and probably Michael too. If I allow myself to get too drunk who knows what I will end up scoffing for an out of control dinner. I hope these observations don't end up as too prophetic, but before the boozing comes the rest of this morning, and the early part of the afternoon.

  My thoughts yesterday, before I knew that this morning would be dull and cold, were split between the idea that I might go for a walk, or I might go to Tesco. I don't really need anything from Tesco desperately, and so I thought I might end up going for a walk. When I look out the window I am don't feel inclined to go for a walk, although as I write this it has got a bit brighter, and it almost seemed like we could get a very short, very weak, very hazy sunny spell, but that hope has now faded. Maybe I might still go to Tesco, but definitely no walk this morning.