40 by Forty

So, what's this challenge all about? As most of you will know, Renae and I play a lot of board games.  A lot of board games.  Our shared love of gaming was one of the things that made our relationship work in the first place and it remains a cornerstone of our marriage now.  Most days we'll settle down to at least one game of something and a fair chunk of our disposable income goes on feeding our habit. Previously, Renae and I designed and made a worker placement game for our big kids based on the How To Train Your Dragon TV series.  It was ok.  It functions well enough, but it's not super engaging for adults.  I also wrote a zombie apocalypse house party game (think one of those murder mystery dinner parties, crossed with the Walking Dead and a choose your own adventure book).  It worked pretty well, but a couple of iterations of play would really help tighten it up.  Obviously enough, I've never quite got around to doing so. Well, the ...

Sunday was mostly occupied by preparations for Renae heading off to America, while the bank holiday Monday was mostly spent saving the post-apocalyptic world from semi-sentient animal-machines, so it's time to dust off a blog-post-I-wrote-earlier! This challenge is courtesy of... Andy Law, who provided a lot of suggestions!  Expect to see his name here again soon. The challenge This is a fairly straightforward challenge.  In fact, I volunteer every two weeks at the local Cub pack, so I'd probably have ticked this off at some point in the year without trying, but that's rather against the spirit of this whole year.  So I'm volunteering at a new event, namely our village clean up day. Armed and ready to tidy Now, anyone who knows me will tell you that cleaning up is not exactly my normal modus operandi .  In fact, we sub-contract that particular part of our life to a very nice woman who comes round to our house once a fortnight and ensures we don't live in...

So, what's this challenge all about? This is a pretty simple one. Like many children, I was made to write thank you notes for my presents. Like many children, I hated it. And, like many children, I stopped doing it as soon as I could. Apparently, my mother has been waiting 30 odd years to change that!  Challenge accepted. How's it going to work? This is perhaps the second simplest of my long-term challenges. I need to write a thank you note for all the gifts I receive over the year but, in order to avoid some sort of recursive thank you note nightmare, I'm not doing notes for those people who were there to be thanked in person at the time of the gift. Practically speaking, this pretty much means a few notes around my birthday and a few at Christmas. Pretty easy. (In fact, it makes me feel a little bad about not doing it before. Damn you, Tatty Bell, damn yooooooooou!)  To add a little entertainment value for me, I'll be writing my thank you cards ...

It's the first week of May and I'm thoroughly in the "oh god, I've got eleven more months of doing this ridiculous shit" doldrums that comes with any lifestyle change. (New Year's resolutions, I'm looking at you.) So let's take a break from long-term challenges and tick off our first one-off challenge: learn to bake bread. This challenge is courtesy of... Emmy, who gets genuine thanks for this one. It falls in that sweet spot of interesting, useful and something I never would have bothered doing otherwise.  Let's bake! The challenge After almost no research at all, I decided to make a rustic (i.e. not in a loaf tin) wholemeal loaf. After a fractionally larger amount of research, I chose this recipe from Waitrose. (Based mostly on the fact it only had four ingredients.) I then singularly failed to find any strong wholemeal bread flour at any of the supermarkets near my office. Eventually, I found where the bakers of the old town shop, ...