-9C most of today, with a breeze, plus snowing enough to give a comfortable amount of ground coverage.

Up early today. Erika slept fitfully from around 4am and then gave in to sleep proper before my alarm was due to go off at 8.30am. Up and at it… especially because Steve had discovered there was no hot water pressure and it was -9C (that’s 18F). Radiators were fine but not the taps. So, we got the furnace going and the furnace’s boiler temperature up, but the electric heater next to it was cold and somewhere there was a blockage, most likely a frozen one. The little oil filled radiator got moved into the workshop to see if any of the pipes behind the furnace needed defrosting.

Steve was home earlyish after he’d been out to the hospital to check his nose was healing up satisfactorily after polyp removal surgery three weeks ago, so he went straight into fault-finder maintenance mode, hunting down whichever pipe was responsible. Finally he found a pipe in the attic which had no insulation around it and had frozen solid. Half an hour later we had hot water again! Going to be a long time before I forget and get complacent and take our hot running water for granted again.

And the first experimental tin of charcoal went into the furnace as well! I’m proper excited at that. Went in early enough to get a lovely long slow burn today so here’s hoping for some good results!

And of course a day with no hot running water makes the perfect day to decide to bake bread from scratch, doesn’t it… First loaf made in our fredlundhus, and the sourdough starter had its first “feed” as well! The dough and the scoby found a happy little spot near the kitchen radiator – thank goodness it was only the taps that were affected and not the central heating!

Diabetes stuff – the glucose monitor is showing up some interesting patterns already. Like the fact that no matter how early I have insulin, my sugars spike to unacceptable levels within an hour of eating unless I simply eat less carbohydrate at any one time. (I feel a return to a paleo style / low carb diet may happen sooner than anticipated.) Juice sends sugars spiking more than I used to think it did, but sugars also fall rapidly after dawdling along at the upper limit for a few hours. Grazing, my preferred eating habit as I’m not a big eater, is only going to work if I can prepare or stock up on some filling, nutricious, and appetising low-carb snacks.