3/50 : Housework, Bagel

While my house isn't necessarily untidy, I can certainly find 82 minutes' worth of cleaning to do even at the best of times, so I took advantage of my free Saturday to give it a once over and complete this task. I started upstairs in the bedroom, with a plan to work my way round the upstairs then continue downstairs. I tidied, hung up clothes, cleaned windows and mirrors, sorted piles of clutter, hoovered, changed the bedsheets... My 82 minutes were up before I'd even finished the bedroom! Ah well. My time completed, I broke for lunch (a delicious, if I may say so, salmon and cream cheese bagel) and then afterwards finished off the other rooms, taking me well into the afternoon. In a way I'm glad I had to do this, since it gave me the impetus to get a lot of things done. Plus the bagel was really nice. It didn't look like the one in the picture, though. It looks like it'd be fairly difficult to do that using cream cheese.

2/50: Walking, Garlic Bread

I thought I would get on with the next challenge, and since the various places I live and work are either less than half an hour's walk apart or more than half an hour's drive, I had to specially arrange a half-hour walk - so, I dug out my gym card, a pair of trainers and a book, and went and sweated a half-hour stint of speed walking on the treadmill. While I initially intended to be discreet about this, the treadmills in the back of the gym were all on the blink, so I resigned myself to being stood in the window where everyone could see me power-walking. Not that I'd notice anyone looking at me - I was engrossed in my book the whole time. Once I'd finished, it felt like I wasn't properly walking on the floor for a few minutes. Mental. I then proceeded to the university refectory for a well-earned lunch, accompanied (of course) by a lovely piece of garlic bread. Action shot here shown - see, I'd just had a shower and everything.

1/50: Watching television, Chocolate Biscuit

A gentle start, I will admit, since I
thought it was better to get started rather than wait until I can get some of the proper ones sorted out - so, as my first act of carb-offsetting, I took along a packet of chocolate biscuits to our weekly viewing of as many episodes of The Wire we can watch before we all fall asleep (when I say we, I mean my The Wire watching club) and shared them out, making sure I savoured my chocolate covered digestive biscuit (accompanied by a cup of tea), and then burned it off shouting 'OMG McNulty you cad' and clapping and whooping whenever Omar came on the screen. We also had a good laugh/cheer when Clay Davies was surprised by something, and said 'shiiiiiiiiiiiiit'.

New Year's Resolution: Do more silly things

This week The Times, which I buy for the crossword, published in the section of the paper conventionally referred to as 'the bit you throw away', i.e. the bit that's not the crossword, an informative poster in an attempt to be The Guardian.

The poster, entitled 'Offset Your Carbs: The Wallchart For Gluttons; listed fifty things which people commonly eat, alongside an activity, giving the amount of time you need to do that activity for in order to burn off the number of calories found in said item of foodstuff.

While some people might interpret this poster as a light-hearted take on the dieter's obsession with calorie counting, and others might follow it like a bible, I have chosen to take it as a challenge, Dave Gorman-style. While I don't expect this will be massively entertaining to many people, I shall certainly aim to be edified, if not bankrupted, by the amazing list of new activities I shall have to perform (as well as some which I used to do but haven't done for a while).

The rules of the game are as follows:

- I will select an item from the board, and must complete the eating of the food and the doing of the activity one after the other, in whichever order I choose. They must take place on the same day, but not necessarily at the same time (for practical reasons).

- Being, as I am, a damned non-alcoholic, six of the fifty items are not an option for me. In these cases, the task may be completed by myself in addition to a surrogate person known to me, and then I will buy them the drink.

- There is no time limit on when or how quickly the tasks must be completed, except that I must have completed all of the tasks by the end of 2010. This averages to one a week, not including the first week of 2010, which I have already missed (wasted), and one week off. My incentive to keep doing them will be this overall time limit, coupled with the fact that the chart will be stuck on the wall and I'll see it quite often.

This is not going to be easy. But it may well be fun. Here will follow 50 posts, or thereabouts, listing successes (and failures) and of course, including photos.

Wish me luck!