Fun with friends

Had a lovely couple of days with friends. Friend H took a break from manic cycling training for her charity cycle ride in a fortnight to come and have a sleepover with madam. She's cycling in aid of the Yorkshire Air Ambulance and the Huddersfield Town AFC Youth Academy and I'm very proud of her.

We have arranged with my parents to go and watch her cycle into Hull on May 1st and madam is really excited about it already!

H has been a super influence and helped with the tidying up no end. We also did some experimental baking and made a rich chocolate beetroot cake that has turned almost every piece of equipment in my kitchen pink! It tastes very nice though and although not completely perfect it was a good first attempt.

We did some new lunch type experiences too. We went to El Taco Loco in the St Stephen's centre in Hull on Tuesday. It was sooooo tasty! And not as spicy as I feared (I really am the most horrendous wuss when it comes to that kind of thing). We resolved to make friend V have it for lunch on Weds, but agreed to head for the rather yummy Rolando's instead.

We then had a lovely lunch and afternoon with V and H. Madam almost managed to behave, but I think the excitement of having two whole visitors rather overpowered her at moments.

She was very sad to see both of our guests go and is counting the days until we have another visitor to stay (she did request that auntie V move in with us). I'm just happy she's managed not to destroy all auntie H's hard work (yet).

So we are mainly going to be eating choc beetroot cake for the next few days and working on making the house more like a showhome. I have resolved to throw even more stuff out and I'm going to get rid of a load of madam's old and/or broken toys tomorrow morning whilst she's at my mum and dad's.

I also need to have a really good review of just how many books I can realistically fit in my house. I love books, and I believe a home is a better place with them in. But perhaps we don't need all of madam's baby books. And I know I have books on my shelves that I don't think I'll ever read again. 

I shall try and keep only the ones I know I will definitely miss if they went. Because I think there'll be so much more I could fill those shelves with instead! A long time ago I made a decision not to buy new books, just secondhand ones and I've mainly stuck to that. But I need to give back so that other people will have the ones I don't need. Seems only fair.

So, I think I might also need to go through my magazines and sort out which ones I actually need to keep (I do only keep knitting/crochet ones) and which ones have no patterns in that I will ever use...

Maybe I might even get round to cutting the patterns out and only keeping those bits. But it might take a while for me to get round to that bit...