Four formidable folk faultlessly ... and here I run out of F words - shifted stuff, swept & Jenna even Henried. Sending our best wishes to Penny. Another good deed completed at Planet Food.

written by Jenna

Jenna arrived for the task at 2pm to find out she had missed all the fun. Apparently the fire alarm had been set off by a photo shoot crew in the church, and the planet food customers had all evacuated the cafe at 1.30pm. At least everyone had eaten! Michael and Jenna cleared away the tables and chairs, swept the floor and emptied the bins , with only this elephant and the staff for company! Good on us! You have to blow your own trumpet sometimes!'

Three GG Yorkies met on a bright but cold morning to join a group of other volunteers along with York BID to help improve the streets of York by repainting some street furniture. We started off with a safety briefing and a run down of what tools and equipment we'd be using and then we got into groups to cover the various areas in the local vicinity. We opted for the snickleways (also known as alleyways, passageways) group and headed over to Nether Hornpot Lane and parallel Finkle Street.

After carefully putting down some newspaper to protect the pavement, we got to work painting some white doors, whilst another volunteer tackled a black drainpipe nearby. Trying not to get in the way of passing pedestrians, we soon had the first set of doors finished and moved down the snickleway onto the next. At this point it was time for me to leave but the rest of the gang stayed on a bit longer to tackle more doors and drainpipes.

There will be another York BID session next week which GG are helping with again - sign up here: https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/cleaning-and-repainting-street-furniture-at-the-york-bid-rejuvenation-day-round-2

Oh, and it was also my 600th good deed today!

*actually black and white!

It was time for celebrations at tonight's group run with so much awesomeness happening recently. Firstly there was a big round of applause for Jenna who got a new PB at the Great North Run. There were also cheers for Vicky, Neil and Ed who all took part in the Tholthorpe 10k at the weekend, especially for Vicky who achieved a season's best time. We then handed out the GGer of the month award to the wonderful Lucy who is pretty much the ideal GoodGymer, always getting involved, always smiling and leading tasks when she can. Oh and it also happened to be AA Vicky's birthday, but more on that later 🥳 🏅 🏆 👏

After a brief warm up, Ed led out the run to Acomb Primary School where we were met by Amanda who gave us the lowdown on tonight's task. Basically continuing the work we'd done previously in clearing the wooded area in the playing field so that it can be used as a forest school. We were soon getting stuck in, armed with saws, loppers and sheers.

There were brambles, sticks and branches everywhere as the busy GGers made excellent progress clearing a path through the woods. The green bins were soon getting filled up and we weren't short of volunteers for people to climb in and jump on top of them to make more space. Although Steve had a helping hand from Rich in getting back out of the bin!

With the task drawing to a close and the woods getting darker we broke on through to the other side and cleared enough space to see some daylight at the end of path, which meant it was time to down tools and get ready for a bespoke fitness session courtesy of the birthday girl herself.

Now, GGers aren't always the greatest listeners and on this occasion there was certainly a little bit of confusion about what type of animal walk we were supposed to be doing and who was supposed to be doing it. So a bit of a reset was needed, but we were soon back underway demonstrating some perfect bear walks in the correct order. I'm not entirely sure if there was a winner but we certainly enjoyed ourselves.

We then gathered in the cones and sung 'Happy Birthday' for Vicky before making our way back to the Priory Centre where some delicious cookies and cake courtesy of Vicky and Jenna were waiting for us 😋