Category: challenge

Even Rocky had a montage…

There has been a thing going around on that there internet that they invented. It is to do with the fact that in the United States around 22 veterans of various ages commit suicide every day.
To raise awareness of this issue, a challenge has been going around to attempt to do 22 press ups a day for 22 days. The idea is that you video yourself doing it and tag a friend each day to get them to do the same. 
My “friend” Steve Ashley tagged me in one of his videos, which I thought was a bit mean of him. I’m a man who likes a challenge though and so I decided to give it a go.
September also happens to be national suicide prevention awareness month. Anything that can reduce the stigma around suicide, whether caused by PTSD or one of many other factors is a good idea in my book. I think that nowadays 
I decided to do the challenge a bit differently to others. I didn’t want to upload a video on Facebook everyday because I am already narcisstic enough on there already as it is and seeing a video every day is bit like overkill. I also didn’t want to annoy 22 other people by nominating them to do the challenge as well. If people want to, then fine. I didn’t want to make anyone feel guilty for not doing it, or pressured into doing it.
I also thought that a montage would be much cooler. 
I also chose to do the challenge as I know that I don’t do enough exercise and in itself it is a good thing. Having the motivation to do so would be a good thing as I’m usually too lazy to force myself to do exercise. It turns out that doing press ups every day makes you better at press ups. Who would have thunk it? You will notice this if you watch the montage video. 
Raising awareness is just one part of the solution and so I decided that I would donate money to the Royal British Legion. I chose to give them £22 as it was an important number in the challenge, plus £1 for every press up that I missed. One day I was so ill that I was only awake for 4 hours and so missed those press ups, and so I have donated £44. 
Below are a montage video plus a video of all the press ups. If it looks like any are missing, then that’s as a result of my poor editing rather than actually missing any.
Here is my montage video:
Or if you want to watch every single press up:

How Do You Eat Yours?

Last month, I found 31 different ways to eat creme eggs. You can see video evidence and recipes if you go here.

The reason this started is because I’m really bad at saying no to challenges.

The reason the challenge came about is because I got 48 Cadbury Creme Eggs for £5 as they were due to go off at the end of July and Bass – who is fast becoming my nemesis – suggested that I’d need to eat them at the rate of more than one day. I thought this would be easy and I was happy to eat one per day and throw the remaining 17 away.

I can’t remember which of us it was suggested finding a different way to do it each day. I’m going to blame Bass because he’s not here and it’s easier to put the responsibility on him rather than accepting that I’m stupid enough to come up with the idea on my own.

The challenge wasn’t actually too difficult. The trickiest part was being creative enough to come up with 31 different ways to eat a creme egg. If you look at the videos, you may see that some ideas are much weaker than others.

What I have learnt from this experience is that you should never dismiss food combinations that sound like they wouldn’t work without giving them a go. Unless I have advised you not to. I recommend never pickling a creme egg. It is possibly the most horrendous thing I’ve ever tried to eat. It was one of the few that I wasn’t able to finish as I felt like I was going to be physically sick.

However, a scotch creme egg is not as bad as it sounds. It actually made me feel bad about the time I went to Chom Choms and laughed at someone who was eating jelly beans with their curry.

I have also cooked in ways that I’ve never cooked before. I finally learnt how to make cheesecakes properly,  I made a lava cake (which if I’m being honest, I’d never heard of before) and I made a creme brulegg which turned out to be my favourite of all the ways of eating a creme egg that I tried, just ahead of a creme egg hot chocolate.

Most importantly though, I have learnt how not to make egg fried rice.  I will try to put this right at some time in the future.  I am likely to be more adventurous in the kitchen after this experience. I want to try out a few of the things that I have tried in their non-creme egg version.

At the moment, I will tend to have three or four meals that I’ll eat pretty much every week and I have realised that my diet isn’t varied enough. I am also now looking to lose a bit of weight in the three months before my birthday having put on quite a bit through both the creme eggs and the items I have been eating them with.

As I was putting links to the videos up on Facebook and Twitter thinking that maybe one or two people would watch them, I was amazed by how many people I bumped into had watched one or two and asked me about what I was doing and took an interest in it. Mostly, I am just grateful that no-one called me a complete idiot for doing this. At least not to my face.