Final Post

As it may by now have become apparent, I have given up on this amazing adventure. Not only have I now got very little time in which to complete all of the remaining tasks, I have also moved to a different house and hence have taken down the poster and I don't know where it is (I assume in the bin).

As much fun as it has been, I don't think I would have done them all anyway so it's probably for the best. The blog does make for a good read though! I hope you have enjoyed reading it and that it inspires you to similar, and hopefully more thoroughly completed, adventures.

14/50: Magnum, Pedalo

No, it's not a new TV detective series - it's yet another one of my quests. I am in London this weekend, enjoying various things, and today we enjoyed Regent's Park, in particular the picnic we had, and the frisbee throwing we did, and the BOATING LAKE WHICH HAS PEDALOS. We jumped in a pedalo and pedalled around for ages and ages, and scared some ducks but carefully didn't run over any. Here are lots of photos, including a picture of me eating a Magnum afterwards. Success all round!

13/50: Night of clubbing, Kebab

In addition to a wonderful five-a-side adventure, my birthday celebration also included a night out, which commenced with a meal in a sushi restaurant, and proceeded on to a bar crawl ending in a club. This almost certainly covered the remit of a night of clubbing, and the picture here pretty much includes everything you need to know about how the night went. In order to match this with a kebab, I waited for less than 24 hours and had one for lunch the next day, and this is pictured over here. It was a very nice pile of chicken and salad on freshly baked naan bread, and I can honestly say that now, around two hours later, it has not yet given me food poisoning, even though the last time I went to that particular kebab place, I did.

12/50: Football, Beer

This week it is my birthday, and hence I have organised various birthday-style shenanigans in order to celebrate this occasion. In fact the first and, some might say, most preliminary of these things was a five-a-side football match. This was not too much hassle to organise, since I already play regularly with some people from uni, and so it took no time at all before I was running around, making precise passes and one twos and keeping goalside of pretty much everyone. Afterwards we all returned to the flat in order to partake of an amazing buffet and some nice cake, and of course, some pints of beer. The whole thing was enjoyable, and I can now tick this one off as being done and dusted. Good work everyone, especially the goalkeepers.

11/50: Running, Gum

This morning, I went to get a paper from the newsagents. As I rounded the corner, I saw a bus coming and quick as a flash, I seized the opportunity and ran, as fast as I could, to the bus stop. I arrived there just before the bus, at which point I stopped running and carried on walking. I'm not sure what the bus driver thought.

This brought me to the actually difficult aspect of this task, which is to eat half a packet of chewing gum (I suppose, for the purposes of the task, in one go). Since the chewing gum is assigned a calorie value, I tracked down some non-sugarfree gum (Wrigley's Doublemint) and brought it home with me. I then unwrapped half of the gum sticks (the sickly sweet smell hit me immediately and was quite unpleasant) and then put them in my mouth all at once (see photo). I now pretty much feel sick, so if you'll excuse me I'm going to continue chewing until I feel as though I have absorbed 25 calories, and spit this out. This is a truly horrible experience.

10/50: Gardening, Pasty

Sorry for the lack of pictures on these posts, I apparently didn't take any. Having completed my epic mowing task, I set to on the rest of the garden - which hasn't been done since the end of last summer, and was looking a bit tired. I started by trimming the bushes at the front and back, especially where they overhang the road, and in the process got stabbed quite impressively all over my hands with thorns. I then set to trimming and pulling up all of last year's growth, much of which was pretty seriously dead, and nearly filled the garden waste wheelie bin in the process.

Finally, I had a bit of a go at clearing all the grass off the flower beds, and did about a tenth of the length of the bed before my knees and hands gave up. I dug a few holes, into which I planted some bulbs I got from the pound shop, which I'm assured will flower around June, and hopefully, if the ones I planted last year have survived, will make for a nice looking bed. The whole process took around 1 hours 50 minutes (give or take... since I went over time with the lawn mowing, I feel loose timing is justified here) and afterwards, I retreated to the sofa for a delicious tasty cornish pasty.

9/50: Mowing the lawn, Pimm's

Seems simple enough. Mow the lawn with an electric mower. Well, whoever devised this list of tasks has obviously never tried to use my new lawnmower, which I have had for a while but haven't used yet, since it's been winter (and grass, as all good gardeners know, doesn't grow very much in the winter). I suspect the makers of the mower had a keen sense of irony, since its name is the CHALLENGE XTREME. Yes, that's a real mower brand.

Not only is it awkward to push around, and the handle feels like it's about to come off most of the time, but this mower has an extra added annoyance noone could have anticipated: Its grass box holds approximately one square metre's worth of grass before it is full. That's not even a massive exaggeration. I mean, the grass wasn't exactly short (the picture provided by the poster is also a bit extreme) , but still - I must have stopped and emptied it thirty times before I'd finished the back lawn, easily filling my 37 minutes. Task completed (or should I say, Xtreme Challenge completed), lovely boyfriend got to enjoy a lovely cool glass of Pimm's and Lemonade, available in can form now apparently, while I got on with my next task...