Sleep Interrupted

Today our cat Tilly died after a short illness. Louise and I are both very sad but Ben and Jess are too young to take on board what it means.

It will be strange not to have her around, as she’s been with us since before the children were born and for all the time we’ve been in our current house. We got her in 2001, around the time we were married, along with her brother Tiger. She was a rescue cat and the rescue centre estimated that she was three years old. That means she was about ten. She certainly didn’t seem old to us.

Tilly was the most docile cat I’ve ever met. She took untold grief from Ben and Jessica and would only scratch after extreme provocation. We couldn’t have asked for a nicer family cat. She was so unassuming I think we all took her for granted… and now she’s gone.

Goodbye Tilly. We’ll all miss you.

Early this morning, much sooner than any of us had expected, Louise’s father, Les Davis, died.

Yes, Sleep Interrupted looks a little different at the moment. It’s an experiment. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Due to changes forced on us by our ISP, this blog will be moving to [a new address](http://ccgi.masterclose.plus.com/weblog/) as of Wednesday.

I’m going to have a bash at hooking up [neworbit.org](http://neworbit.org/) as the permanent address. This works at the moment, but in a fairly inelegant way, so I wouldn’t suggest using it by default quite yet.

Our usually reliable [ISP](http://plus.net/) had a catastrophic disk failure over the weekend, meaning that this blog was temporarily wiped off the face of the Internet. Luckily I had most of it backed up, so we’re online again. Only the photos are missing, and I should have those back up in a day or two.

So. I’ve finally gone and joined all the [cool kids](http://wilwheaton.net/ “Wil Wheaton Dot Net”) on the intarweb and got myself a weblog.

Why? Well, I used to enjoy talking to my friends down the pub over a pint. But as time passed, many of them moved away — I doubt James and Vicky will be making the Reading to Sydney trip for a swift half — and now that I have a young family of my own, I don’t get many evenings off.

It’s a cliche, but I really didn’t realise how much I missed it until it was gone. The infrequent times we do meet up seem to pass in a blur and there’s so much left unsaid, on my part at least.

This weblog is my solution — it might even work! Emailing just doesn’t seem right any more, and my growing sense of pompous self-importance demands that I stake my claim in the blogosphere. And of course, you will be hanging on my every word here. Or something.

The plan has been circulating in my head for about the past six months. The catalyst for actually doing something about it was my wife, Louise, giving birth to our second child, Jessica. So, rather than the pub-talk topics I originally intended, expect lots of pictures of Jessica and her brother Ben. At least for the time being. If you’re not interested, don’t read. I’m not the boss of you!