I’ve survived. Let’s wrap this all up, shall we?

I started the month with a few goals in mind. I wanted to take 30 Day Challenge to be a Better Man. I wanted to deactivate my Facebook account, at least for the month of November. I wanted to grow a mustache to support prostate cancer awareness. I wanted to write 50,000 towards my novel to finally win NaNoWriMo. And finally, I wanted to do 3,000 sit ups and 3,000 push ups in increase my health and physique. I passed this month with flying colors.

First off, today’s final task for my 30 Day Challenge was to get a straight razor shave. While I certainly would love to take part in this, I was limited in how I could. I certainly have access to a straight razor, there is an old Soviet era Drujzba (Friend) sitting in the drawer not three feet from where I am sitting and writing this:

The problem is, I can’t for the life of me get it sharp enough to cut through hair. I don’t have a whet stone with a fine enough grit, nor do I have any of the other requirements for sharpening it.

I did, however, get a very similar experience by using a single bladed razor to shave, though I nicked the hell out of my face. I have a single bladed razor which I picked up at the bazaar. I use Sputnik razors just like my old host dad Vlodja used to do:

Here’s the result of the shave:

You may notice that I left the mustache. My month of growing it is up, so I certainly could shave it away but I’ve opted to keep it. I’m going to try for a beard next. We’ll see how long that takes.

Here’s the stages of my mustache growing over the past month:

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As I mentioned a few days ago, I won NaNoWriMo with 50,045 words this year and promptly hung up my pen for the remainder of the month. I’ve been itching to get back to writing though. I don’t want the freakish calluses on my index and middle fingers to disappear before I start again. Today I played around with how I’m going to get all the words into digital form and found out how frustrating Microsoft’s speech recognition can be. I’ll give it another go before I give up on it.

And finally, I completed my 3,000 push ups and sit ups today. I’ll also be taking a break from these before I get back into them. It’s tiring. I don’t have a photo from the beginning of the month because I forgot to take one, but I do have a photo from when I began doing push ups and sit ups back in August. The bulk of my toning has come in the past month. Here’s the before and after:

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The pictures might not show it, but there is a definite difference from then to now and it doesn’t have to do with my tan.

I will admit, I went onto Facebook once this month. I wanted to check a message that was left on my cat’s profile page on her birthday. When I opened the page, it looked clunky, old and ugly. I was on for less than five minutes. I have no desire to go back. I’m going to remain off of Facebook. If you really want to find me on a social network, I play around with Google+ from time to time, check out my profile and circle me if you want.

I think that about sums it up. I want to thank everyone for keeping up with me this month. I had a great time doing all of it, even if I might have complained from time to time about being tired. Do you have any more challenges you’d like to see me complete? Shoot me an email at danny@sassyhacksaws.com or leave a comment. I’ll be happy to take up new challenges.