I had great eggs-pectations from the team tonight and they didn’t let me down!

We had a nice chilled out task today of filling knitted chicks with eggs for Alexander Devine Hospice and their Big Chick Knit campaign. We needed a nice warm indoor space to do this task and very kindly Clare offered her venue at Stoke Park Trust and as a bonus she invited some of her team to join us.. winner winner chicken dinner!

We are as chick as thieves and wanted to get started on the task as quickly as possible but before we could do that we had to do a warm up of course! So with a nice gentle warm up of walking to lunging to arm swinging we were egg-cited to start.

We had the best table to work on too! One covered in egg like balls also known as a pool table!

Working around the cluck

You better watch your behavior or you’ll get eggs-pelled from the group - actually that would never happen so we worked extra hard to be naughty! Each chick was given a name … egg-stra challenge was that it had to start with D (for duck!… because they looked more like ducks!)

The names started off easily enough… we had a Derek, a Doug and a Dickie… we then went deep to our roots and chose names from our cultures (or near enough)… so we had Punjabi ducks called Davinder and Daljeet, Iranian duck called Darius, Irish duck called Darragh, Bengali ducks called Devajani, Muslim ducks called Daniel and good old British ducks called Dave!

We worked slowly but surely and soon had all the chicks (aka ducks) filled so it was time for the fitness fun to begin.

Best of cluck!

In pairs we worked around the room working on 4 exercises from agility ladder to med ball halos to lat pull downs and overhead raises..

Followed by a good old party game of musical chairs!

Well done to Hamid for being the ‘Champion’

Thank you all for getting involved in tonight’s task.

Next week we are at St Mary’s Church on Church St helping with a spring clean (meet up point is Upton Court park at 6:30pm)

This was our first task helping Kate and Alice from the Not Just a Store shop in Slough. This community initiative was set up last year and has been supporting Slough residents with low cost food/household items as well as a community fridge.

Imagine a charity shop that was not clothes, but food instead!! That’s us.

Here's a bit more about Not Just from their website :-

This is a fundraising community store for our non-profit NotJUST (International) CIC. We work with distributors all over the UK that end up with food and items that are past best before and surplus, and save it from landfill in bulk. The food is then sorted into our food banks, sharing with smaller community groups, and going into stores like this!

This store is a social supermarket that is open to every member of the public: no membership required. A lot of our food is past its best before, and a lot of our food and items are sold at a discounted price. We also have some items ‘available for a donation’, where you can choose how much you wish to donate. It’s entirely up to you, but the more you donate, the more people in crisis we can help. We also run a community fridge, filled with goodies also available for a donation.

'It's a sin' to waste so much food when it is perfectly edible and this is just the type of waste warriors task we like!

I first touched base with the store back in November when I went to have a little nosey at the store and introduce GoodGym to the team. We then went our separate ways until December when we reunited at the Slough CVS Community Network event. The Not Just team were 'Always on my mind' so it was great to go say Hi again and see if they had a task for us. And low and behold they did!

You'll need a big team

Said Alice!

With 19 attendees we did not let her down!

It was great to have Ryan return for his 2nd task. A very warm welcome to Vineet and Sheena on their 1st task, and thank you to Clare from Stoke Park Active for bringing her team members down for this task - their very 1st GoodGym experience (welcome to Salman, Mansoor, Ray and Michelle). We had other important numbers floating around today....Huge congratulations to Sara on her 250th good deed today. Sara has been supporting Slough since we launched in 2018. She was our Queen shopper during Covid, a community missioner with a passion and our mission making possible member (helping older people with one off tasks) and she has always been an integral member of our team - well done on your 250th.

On Sunday Pam knocked out her 350th good deed, very closely followed by her 351st and today her 352nd. Known affectionately as Ninja Pam, Pam again has been a core member since 2018. We wouldn't know what do to without Pam's gardening knowledge and general calmness. Thank you for all our efforts over the years.

Thank you to Claire for coming over from the Windsor and Maidenhead GG Team - great to meet you

The Task:

I popped in to see Kate earlier today to see the areas we would be working on. This helped me work out the run/walk route as well - only question I had was do we Go West or east?...lets go west... I decided on a shorter route today as my lunchtime run left me with frozen ears! I did wonder 'What have I done to deserve this? Then I remembered that I run for pleasure!

At the warm up which Hamid did so very well...we all decided on a walk from Greggs to Costa. Ruth lead the walkers whilst I back marked. Our total time out walking was around 20 minutes. We all just wanted to get back as quick as possible for the warmth of inside where we met Kate and she gave us the lowdown of the tasks.

We had two areas to concentrate on today:

• Creation of the Pet Shop area;
• Sweeping and mopping of the 'football' sized space upstairs

I knew Sara would be great at leading the Pet Shop area as she likes pets! haha...no point having me there! And Sweeping Sandy and Rocking Ruth helped to lead the upstairs task. With so many of us in attendance at times, there was a bit of 'Domino Dancing' going on but both teams did a great job of their respective tasks.

The Pet Shop Boys (and girls) did a smashing job at banging the back panels in place before fitting the shelves. Vineet and Sheena got stuck into this task with excellent guidance from everyone expect me...I'm clueless at coming up with racking suggestions. Agnija (our birthday girl) managed to source a hammer and banged the panels in place. Overall, the team made a shelf-improvement to how it looked at the beginning.

The Va Va Broom team upstairs had mastered a team method at sweeping (put two brushes together and Bob's your uncle...a greater area is covered). They then cracked on with mopping the floor. What a mop-tastic job they did!

The Broom Challenge

Our fitness part of the session tonight was a game of chase the broom. The team stood in a circle each holding a broom stick in their right hand, on the call of 'go', they had to release their broom and as quickly as they could grab the broom of the person on their left. If you didn't get to the broom in time you were out. Well done to Ryan and Hamid for making it to the final. Our eventual winner was Hamid!

The January challenge

Thank you to everyone getting involved in the January challenge. We met our good deeds target on Sunday and have now exceeded it thanks to all our attendees tonight. Well done team #GGSlough. Just got to get that 750km distance target met now (half way there!)

There are still plenty of January sessions to get involved in. See you at one!

Our last session of the year brings us to Stoke Park Active and an indoor Christmas present wrapping task. A perfect end to the year.

Clare our task owner cum GoodGym member had given us a Christmas cracker of a task - we were pack some treats into little goody bags, wrap them up, tidy up the venue and get it all ready for the panto that Clare and her amazing team are doing for the children that come along to their sessions.

As the weather had made it virtually unsafe to run on the footpaths due to flooding and muddy conditions, we actually missed the run part and cracked in with the task part....but I had a master plan....there was still a fitness session involved that would earn the team their treats.

So after we had done this and done that, shifted that chair and this table we were ready to rumble.. I had prepared a 12 days of Christmas fitness challenge with a reducing time frame.... 1 burpee, 2 push ups, 3 prisoner squats and so on all the way to 12 star jumps. I thought I had demo'd it all really well....but the videos show that VR was needed as some level of cheating did take place...and some level of mis counting..but it was all in the name of fun and both teams did an amazing job!

As well as the 12 days exercises we had a moves based Chinese whisper type of game! Less said about this the better! And the finale was a strict game of instructions! Fail the instruction - you got kicked out - I had final sleigh on it!

Oh and we had a bit of karaoke!

Thank you to our amazing 14 volunteers for coming along to our last session of 2023! and a very warm welcome to Ali

Let's review our tree-mendous 2023

January

We had double deeds galore as we kick started the January challenge and spent some time guarding the iconic knife angel, and not forgetting a whole load of parkrunning

February

All you seed is love as we helped Artful Hub on numerous tasks this month helping to get them set up in their new unit

March

We made a sweeping statement as we continued to help the Ujala Foundation with their community garden and lets not forget Jean obtaining her 100th Good Deed

April

We had a Ra-leigh good time as launched our partnership with Raleigh and enjoyed some Easter treats.. Jen and Gauri will remember the shed sort out for Shin! We really did like to 'move it move it'

May

We saw some fashion items that were a blast from the past as we continued to help Thames Hospicecare. New tasks were starting to pile up as we started helping some local churches like St Paul's and St Mary's

June

The plot thickened allot this month as the weeds just kept on growing on our allotments task with Home Start. Lucky we had some keen gardeners in the team with Pam, Peter and Jen...plus a handy app to decipher a weed from a plant! This is the month that we built a stronger relationship with Slough Refugee Support and Mehdi, Hamid, Mohammed and Eshan joined us.

July

Hi Five to us all as we celebrated our 5th birthday! Our first group race at Beat the Boat was knot too shabby!

August

Pew..we did it! Plenty of outdoor tasks as we basked in the summer sunshine helping St Mary's Primary school with painting and gardening as we well as plenty of gardening tasks at St Paul's

September

More swede times as our gardening skills grew!

October

Our GhoulGym was out in full force with our Hallo-clean tasks

November

Didn't we win an award (or two??).... Group of the Year...lets just leave it there

December

Wrapping it up now with our networking natters, keeping the rein(deer) as bay and getting some indoor tasks with Shin and Clare

We clocked up a huge 498 tasks in 2023 by 51 members

So what's going on in 2024? PLENTY!

Yule be sorry if you don't attend our January sessions to get your good deeds and km's logged. Our target for January is 55 good deeds and 750km's. I've kept it realistic this year as we do have a natural drop in our good deeds overs the years so hopefully this target feels more achievable.

This is our first community mission on Friday 5th January 10.30 - 11.30 at Slough Outreach shop

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/sorting-out-clothes

We then have a double deed Sunday with volunteering at Salt Hill junior parkrun and then a litter pick (we will actually be doing this every Sunday in January, so plenty of good deeds to be had)

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/parkrun-volunteer-f8984433-06c5-488b-ba7c-6d295b22be77

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/community-litter-pick-740a7a7f-0aaa-47d6-870f-9af261ddf7f2

Then our first Monday eve group session is on Monday 8th January helping Slough Outreach again with a clothes sort out

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/helping-slough-outreach-at-new-unit-in-cippenham-b336979c-bdeb-49f9-9f5d-888cb2290ff5

The following Monday we have a task that requires LOTs of volunteers, so if there is only one Monday that you can do please do this one. Its helping the Not Just a Store - waste warriors shop on the Bath Rd with setting up the Pet Food area.

https://www.goodgym.org/v3/sessions/waste-warriors-helping-at-the-new-community-fridge-and-landfill-reduction-shop

So that's all folks...time to Ho Ho Home

Enjoy your rein-beers and have a great festive break.

This was our third year of helping The Burnham Lions with their annual Christmas parade.

But with a wash out of a day, the organizers had to make some last minute changes like take the performances indoors and change the time of the light switch on.

Jen and I had the task of directing people in Burnham Hall followed by parade support and sleighing it with Santa, whilst Clare was on bucket duty.

With the weather keeping the crowds lower in capacity, Santa had an all time PB of a 10 minute parade!

And luckily for us all the rain stayed away during that time.

We had a last minute cancellation of task today but we never gift up as we soon had one lined up with Clare from Stoke Park Trust helping to wrap up presents for their grotto, tinsel up some tea lights, sort through Christmas lights and a bit of light hovering

We met at the task location at 6:30pm and those wishing to get out for a run went off for a 10 minute out and back run with Ruth back marking and me leading.

Whilst those who wanted to just do the task met us at the task location at 7pm

Clare gave us the low down on what she wanted us to do… there was no time like the present to crack on.

Pam, Keith, Devajani, Maya, Kam and Jean spent some qualitree time wrapping up the empty boxes

Ruth was doing her best not to get her tinsel in a tangle and get it nicely wrapped around the tea lights

Whilst I was doing my best impersonation of Freddie and the famous hoovering scene …

The task was nicely wrapped up in 45 minutes.

Thank you Clare for the last minute task - much appreciated