And a fine challenge it was

It ended yesterday. But I’m posting a summary today…to let myself drink in the challenge results. Yeah, that’s it.

First off, thanks to everyone who participated. Last year we had a much more limited field, and seeing it explode out as it did this time around has been awesome.

I’ve been making an effort lately to blog more frequently, and that’s easier to do when other people are doing the same. A lot of people earn Super Double Secret Awesome Points for having posted every single day. And hey, Kelly and Vlad each managed to exceed 4 posts! And that’s all kinds of special.

I’m going to award Hyper Secret Uber Awesome Points to Brad…not only did you post every day, you continued to do so during a move across an International border. That deserves recognition, sir (though a live blog during the actual crossing of the border would have been awesome, and aroused enough suspicion that we all could have laughed at the ensuing searches of everything you own). Of course, your previous excuses of “But I can’t write!” have now been rendered null and void, so buck up and write every so often.

Liam came in with a theme, and he stuck to it for the most part. I’m curious to see where the story goes from here (PRESSURE! PRESSURE!). I’m also curious to follow along his workout routine and how it goes for him.

Kyle and Erron entertained with stories of farming, raising their kids, escapist swine, a mouse hunting dog (shouldn’t any animal fitting that description be a cartoon character?) and food.

James showed up on occasion to rage about the food industry, forcing me to leave essentially the same goddamn comment on several different occasions (I’m going with the excuse that I was sinking all of my creativity in to my blog posts). Anyway, he also told us stories of adjusting to being a full time parent.

Kim entertained with tales of educating kids and raising her family, of Liam constructing things (that’s a terrifying combination of words) and of how to mummify your kids…or something like that.

Janine briefly told us all how dead her workplace is.

Shaun managed to convince us (more or less) that he isn’t a crazy bastard following a business scheme akin to Jack buying those magic beans with the family’s food budget.

Tammy told us all a little more about herself, which was nice since our knowledge of her wasn’t exactly encyclopedic (Dating Chad, has a sweet theatre room in the house, dated a guy in high school who had the classic sex van with the murals painted on the side).

Chad managed to avoid ‘31 Days of WoW’, and did a nice job of varying his topics enough that I can’t immediately come up with something to mock him for.

As for me, I’m happy I didn’t turn the Challenge in to a 31 day deluge of sports, fantasy football draft recaps and gaming posts. I always like to keep people guessing by throwing in some personal back story right after my “DAMN! This ROXORZ!” type post. I like going from “Ha! Look at these idiots!” to “Here’s some personal pain.” without any kind of warning.

And since there was initially some talk of cross-blog topics, let’s remember what those were.

The Food Industry certainly popped up in a couple of places.

Pollution & What we’re doing to ourselves showed up in a few spots.

Stealing Shaun’s Dreams seemed to be something of a popular topic, along with Does Shaun want to surround himself with yes men? (Happily, the answer seems to be no)

Music appeared in several places, mostly in a personal ‘Here’s what I like’ capacity.

Parenting stuff popped up all over the damn place. And apparently Liam’s all controversial and shit with his child rearing methods.

And finally, but certainly not lastly, Furniture dry humping as dance. Because I’m sure that’s a subject that everyone anticipated becoming popular.

Where does it go from here? Not sure. For me, I’m going to start a second AAR for a Close Combat play through over on the other blog, as well as continuing my Front Office Football one. So that’ll eat up some time. Beyond that, I plan to blog when there’s something to blog about…basically what I was starting to do before the challenge.

For everyone else, I really hope that you keep it up. It doesn’t need to be daily…it shouldn’t be something you force yourself to sit down and write every single day (that sort of torture should be reserved for challenges!). But I’ve really enjoyed getting a chance to read what all of you have had to say, and I hope that I can look forward to continuing to do so.