We started today's session by saying our geeky interest in honour of Embrace your Geekness day! There were mentions of spreadsheets, cloud spotting and jigsaws to name a few.

We also congratulated the group of goodgymers who completed the 58 mile ultra in the lakes in the heatwave and the group who ran up and down Snowdon despite their race being cancelled.

Mitch then led off a small splinter group to Acomb Library.This is what they got up to-

We arrived at the library not to new raised bed, but old rotten beams of wood. We quickly got to work moving them from the garden and out to the drive. These will now be used for the path at fishponds woods.

After half an hour the garden was left crystal clear.

The remainder of the group headed to New Walk to drag many sacks of grass to the collection point. In goodgym style this was completed much quicker than expected so we headed off for a bit of fun fitness in the form of goodgym scrabble.

Despite stretching it out we still had a nice early finish so a few thirsty folk headed to the pub where in true geek style, Paul showed some strava tricks which got us debating each others' popularity!

Michal arrived early, very well equipped with various tools and bits of wood leftover from his home DIY project. The rest of us (some of us fresh from a previous mission) soon joined him in the sunshine and made our way to the garden area at the rear of Acomb library. Unfortunately this area was recently vandalised and a lovely memorial bench and one of the raised beds were badly damaged.

We managed to remove some of the loose sides of the bed and took out the more rotten pieces, removing various large bolts and nails, along with some of the soil. Then we managed to piece it back together using some spare pieces of wood that we trimmed to the correct size, various brackets (one of which we had to fetch back out of the waste bin after much conversation as to whether we should keep it or not!), nails, screws and pieces of wood from the damaged bench (which sadly was not salvageable). We used some more slats from the bench to brace part of the raised bed on the other side to stabilise another loose piece that was threatening to collapse.

The damaged bench had a lovely inscription in memory of a City of York Council colleague. Fortunately the inscription was mostly intact so Michal (who also works for the council) said he would take it away with him so that he can figure out a way that it can be re-mounted/displayed in some other form. We look forward to seeing what he comes up with!

After a quick tidy up to get rid of all the bits of loose and rotten wood we left the area looking much neater and cared for and the raised bed repaired and safe from falling apart. The library staff kindly offered us some refreshments (as they have a great café on site) and we enjoyed them sat outside in the sunshine where we could admire our handiwork. We even managed to join the GG central team 1pm plank session!