I've finally uploaded a few pictures to our website.

See :

• Rowan on his tummy
• Our new office
• Rachel's birthday cake (cake-pod anyone?)
• Emily's photos of us camping near Bromyard

As all the stuff I seem to want to write about these days really doesn't fit with the style of this site, so I've got a new blog for all my mummy thoughts.

If you're interested in those things, read Muddling Through Motherhood. It's still a work in progress, needs some static pages and a proper design, but I'm working on it.

Hopefully nothing else is going to die on me this week, but yesterday my bicycle suffered a fatal injury. I knew the frame was cracked in one place, and was about to take it to A&E (bike shop) but it beat me to it.

See : here for the gory pictures

When I did take it to the bike shop this morning, I discovered it had another crack in the seat stem... so in total - 3 defects on one frame. Nice.

Yesterday (17th of May 2008), Cassie (the dog) died. She signed off peacefully on a campsite near Bromyard (Herefordshire) after a sudden unknown illness that started in the morning. She was subsequently buried under a blooming damsen tree on my mother's farm.

She'll be best remembered for her ability to :

• bite unsuspecting individuals (Alex) and family members (Emily),
• producing some horrible smells,
• obediance,
• loyalty
• and a night time trouble making streak (bin emptying and weeing on the fridge/freezer!)

Well this will be the last of the neverending, frequent Rowan entries. I'm sure I'll still do the odd one, but we're intending to move the rest over to Rowan's new site, which I may even one day pick a skin for!

Anyway, he's going to be blogging for us (really, he tells me what to type! ;-) ), so head on over there and add his feed to your aggregator if you want to keep up with the incessant updates about sleeping, eating and pooing!

Since Rowan was born, I've made an effort to get in touch with some people. Unfortunately for them, I have some conditions that I need met for me to be comfortable seeing them. 'Unfortunately' for me, it appears they won't accept those. 7 happy and confident years without them has taught me that I'm a better person under my terms, but still I felt that I ought to make the effort to let them see Rowan.

http://youtube.com/user/GingerDog for some random videos of Rowan doing baby things.

Suffice to say, we're really happy with our Sanyo CA6 Xacti (VPC-CA6) which records straight to mpeg4 on a normal SD card; and it's quite small as far as camcorders go.

I've tried out Firefox 3 again (it's now in beta4), mostly prompted by this article (and linked to blog posting by a FF dev.). The even better news is that Firebug 1.1 works with FF3, which means I can make the switch at work.

I like the UI changes; password storing etc is better (one less popup window) and it certainly seems quicker on my computer (is FF3 honouring expires headers when FF2 didn't?)... so it seems to be all good.

Today, I cooked a full roast dinner, with slight supervision ("Be careful - the knife is sharp!") as my Mothers day present. I ended up having to undergo this ordeal as I was too useless to book a table in any local restaurant in time.

Before stuffing my face with roast beef, I pre-empted my excessive calorie intake by by running nearly 13 miles.

In other news, last night, Rowan managed to sleep for 4 hours (and then 3 afterwards), which was a welcome change from his normal regular 2 hour feeds through the night.

It was our fortnightly health visitor visit today, and Rowan is currently a whopping 10lb 4oz - an increase of 1lb 6oz since his last weigh-in two weeks ago. It is comforting to know that all the time he spends eating is for a purpose, and all the time he spends vomiting isn't having too detrimental an effect on that!