Told you so!

See, see I told you I’d update, all of you who had a shred of doubt, I say “ha!” and “Ha!” again, although to be fair it’s not like I’ve had past form, so I guess I can over look it this one time. Just cos’ it’s you!

Today in our office we have a Dress Down day as we do on the last Friday of every month, however our usual office administrator (read: secretary, but just don’t call her that) is on maternity leave and her replacement is, how shall I say this? A little excitable, where charity is concerned, don’t get me wrong I’m all for charity and we usually all give £1 each and it is donated to a different charity each month, but being English, it’s all done very quietly and discreetly with no fan-fare or fuss.

This month our dress down day just so happened to correspond with World Aids Awareness day and our new secretary office administrator sent round a very enthusiastic e-mail telling us all about it and your truly was roped in again to bake cakes to sell for the proceeds to go to the good cause, which is fine, it only takes 5 minutes to knock up a load of flap-jacks and a Lemon Drizzle cake, but this morning if one more person said “where are the cakes?” “Have you put the cakes out yet?” “What time will you be putting the cakes out?” etc I think I might have punched someone in the face and sat in the reception area eating them all myself in front of all the drooling people and been like “Serves you right, have a little bit of patience!”

I didn’t though I was the pinnacle of calmness and serenity and just told them I was waiting until 9 O’clock until everyone was in the office so that no one missed out, as some people in our office can be slightly gluttonous and the cakes are usually gone in under 10 minutes and last time there was some moaning about not everyone got Lemon Drizzle and had to make do with just chocolate brownie – I know your heart just bleeds doesn’t it!?! – So, I waited until everyone was in and unpacked my goodies, it was a little like the feeding of the Raptors in Jurassic Park so I just opened the lid and whipped my hand out quickly just to make sure I escaped with all my fingers in tact. It took about 5 minutes for the boxes to empty and hopefully we’ve made a bit for charity and I can sleep easy knowing I’ve done my good deed.

I think that’s enough for now, post done!

We’ll be doing some more cooking this weekend, as N’s pitiful whimpers as I packed up the cake to take into the office made me promise I’d make another one this weekend just for him, plus we’re making Gordon Ramsey’s winter Casserole which looks yummy, I’ll let you know how we get on.

Toodle-pip!

I Suck!

I apologise for my complete and utter rubbishness, I promised to update and then didn’t. I’m definitely going to get nothing but a lump of coal in my stocking from Santa this year.

Any-hoo, moving on. We have come on leaps and bounds in our house lately with all the decorating, we now have new (colour co-ordinated) curtains in the front room and, and curtains in the spare room (well it only took 15 months) so that now when guests stay over we won’t have to tape brown paper up to the window to stop them being blinded at 6am when the sun streams through the window at the back of the house, we are, however, not quite out of the woods, as I in my wisdom have decided that the perfectly nice cream linen curtains need to be dyed navy so that they better contrast with the rug and sofa bed cover we have from Ikea (tried to find a link to a picture of the bed cover but can’t, take it from me though it’s really nice), so I’m really making a rod for my own back, but the housing market being what it is we’ll be stuck where we are for the next 5-6 years, so I might as well make the house look like I want it to.

I am very excited as this year I will be participating in for the first time the patented Weetabix Holiday Card Exchange! I love getting Christmas cards, but don’t tend to get many now as where I work people usually just send an e-mail saying “Merry Christmas, we’ve made a donation to charity this year instead of sending cards” which is great in a Bob Geldof type way, but I still like getting cards, so this year I will get loads – yippee.

Plus I have these great things to hang them up with, I am such a sucker for kitschy Christmas crap!

Also we’re going to buy our tree this weekend, a little early I know, but this is our first real Christmas in this house and I want to make the most of it, hopefully some nice pictures as well, that is if Saffi doesn’t pull it down in the first five minutes.

That’s all for now, but I will update tomorrow, I promise, cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye, I always thought that was a little gruesome for children to be saying, but I suppose it did me no harm, hey no sniggering at the back!

Hello – anyone still out there??

Well, where to start – it seems I have become somewhat lackadaisical (I love that word!) in my blogging posting of late (I can’t really call what I do blogging, not sure why?) and so am back with a flourish to announce that I am going to try my bestest to post more frequently, at least five four three times a week.

Well let’s catch up shall we?

It’s been all go in the LannyLee household lately, we’ve been on a mission to decorate since we had our 1-year assessment from the house builders and had all the annoying little cracks in our plaster work patched up. We have been given the green light to decorate and so have jumped in with gusto to find the perfect shade of paint to go with the wallpaper we had bought, and to find a suitable shade of red for the kitchen, as we have some funky, not to mention cheap and cheerful plates that we are basing the colour scheme of the kitchen on. We eventually settled on Moroccan Red
and there’s enough left to even do the downstairs loo. (well there is a recession on, waste not want not!) We have chosen a colour called Mushroom for the bedroom, living room and landing, (I’d link to the colour on the H0mbase website, but I can’t seem to find it) luckily there was an offer on 3 for 2 on all tins of 2.5L so we managed to get six tins of paint for £45 (which my mum gave us the money for), even better we managed to get two for free as despite pre-ordering and paying in advance for the five tins the muppets at said DIY store managed to put them on the shelf and consequently sold two of them. Cue Lanny getting very annoyed and an extremely apologetic service manager offering to refund the two tins and urgently re-order them – score! Six tins of paint for £21.98, brilliant!

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Oooh, before I forget – does anyone have a good pea and ham soup recipe (I’m looking at you Stephie ), the only ones I can find seem to be for pea soup with ham added and that’s not what I want. If you do please e-mail me lannylee_diaryland at hotmail dot com – thank you.

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I finally got around to using the lovely spa voucher N got me for my birthday way back in January and since it had to be used by December the 1st I though I’d book it for last weekend. It was at the lovely Bannatyne health centre in Peterborough and came with 2 all day passes to the gym facilities including the steam room, sauna and swimming pool etc, so while I went off for a lovely back massage N did a little workout and we both enjoyed a nice Jacuzzi and swim for the rest of the afternoon, it was much needed and we both came out feeling relaxed and refreshed, which then allowed us to tackle painting the kitchen, though not alas the downstairs loo – baby steps people, baby steps, I’m not bloody Carol Smillie!

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We had a brilliant day in our office for Children in Need, we were going to have the usual “if you give us a quid you can come in your own clothes” type thing, however one of the guys in our logistics team said that if we raised £200 between our three offices he’d come in for the day dressed as a women. So everyone said they’d give whatever they could, however me being a bit skint (what else is new) I said I’d bake some cakes to sell and the proceeds could go towards it, I asked for suggestions and ended up baking: Lemon drizzle cake, brownies, flap-jacks and chocolate cornflake cakes. The last two were specially requested as we have a girl in our office who is gluten intolerant and I didn’t think it was fair to make all this yummy stuff if she couldn’t have any, plus everyone likes a good cornflake cake, don’t they??

The cakes went down a storm and at 25p a go I managed to raise about twenty quid to go towards to final total, so all in all we raised £430 – not bad and we’re trying to get the company to match it, but I won’t hold my breath.

Well I think that’s enough for now and I promise to be a bit more frequent with the posting.