For this award, you have to cover a few areas and get involved in a few things, and what I did is detailed below. I'll keep the photos to a minimum, and just put in a couple at the end.
Service - we are expected to do some volunteering. It considers charities, places of worship or similar. I've opted to count a long weekend helping out on the tech team at a science fiction convention. Possibly on the more unusual side, but it is a volunteer role, it is the kind of thing that is necessary, and makes a big difference to an event. Each convention is run in its own right, and, with the exception of the guests of honour, everyone pays a membership, from the chair to the first-timer, so whilst it might be a very specific community, it is a community. It is also one of the best kind of places to find acceptance, so to anyone who says that isn't service, believe me, if you are always the outsider this is one of the very few places where you can usually feel welcomed, and they need staff to be able to run the events.
Myself - I found myself training for and walking a half marathon last year. Whilst I walk a lot, 13 miles in a day is still significant enough to be worth mentioning. This was also urban walking, the half marathon was in London. With that in mind, I actually minimised my walks in the countryside and found myself walking around a local path rather a lot. I was really pleased that come the walk day, I managed it in a reasonable time, and reasonably steadily. I was also OK the following day, not too stiff, and feeling good within myself. I might not have trained as much as I should have, but I trained enough to bounce back. The real proof of that was when I walked another 20 miles over 2 days within a week of that specific challenge.
Teamwork - So I'm actually counting just a small part of some massive teamwork that I was taking part in last year. Before the Escape PODS were run at Charnwood, we had to do some training, and I along with someone else organised that training. So I'm counting that first weekend of training for my teamwork, from being part of the group arranging timings for arrivals, food (it was a weekend and away from home for most of us!), various things of how to run the weekend, and then the weekend itself, agreeing aspects for the team in the longer run, helping to set up and run practice games, and all sorts of other aspects to it. This is a team training, and the Escape PODS went well at Charnwood, keep an eye out, they may appear again in my blog.
Skills - I decided to actually focus on and improve my singing when it came to my skills work. I'm a member of a local community choir and was able to attend a workshop run with a barbershop theme, which was new to me. I've certainly noticed an improvement and focused on my breathing techniques, and that has improved. What's really great (?) about the choir I'm in, the musical director arranges the songs and will pass the melody around the parts - despite being an alto I don't spend too much time singing one note. In fact, there are times I think the sopranos get more of than the altos do. The downside to that is we are often expected to have a range, in one arrangement the altos go from the E below middle C to the D above the C above! What is actually great is that I'm reaching those notes without too much strain at either end, so my range is getting closer and closer to two octaves, so that is a skill that has improved.
Explore My World - What I counted for this was one of my bucket list items, at least in part. The item I ticked off my bucket list was to see a show on Broadway, the bit of the world I explored was New York, New York. I had about 48 hours to myself in NYC before I had to be attending things for a work conference, and one evening off during the conference. I spent quite a bit of time looking at what there was to do, and what was on my must-see list, and what I would regret not doing. Then in two days, I saw more than some people see in a week, and I want to go back and look again at things I looked at quickly in more detail, and see at least some of the things I didn't get to see the first time around. It was in NYC that I walked those 20 miles within a week of the half-marathon distance in London. On my first day, I bought a ticket to a show, then walked around Manhatten, I saw lots of places from the outside in the rain. I visited the Public Library briefly, had lunch at Grand Central Station, got down to Wall Street and Ground Zero, managed to visit two GSUSA shops/sites, watched The Lightning Thief (the Percy Jackson Musical) and had a look around Times Square after dark. My second day, I bought a ticket to another show (the box office had managed me a deal the day before, and the second one was a rush ticket), I then walked up to and around Central Park in some lovely sunshine, getting to see a number of places I'd only ever seen in movies or TV shows, I took the subway back towards Brooklyn, had a quick walk through Chelsea Market, saw a little bit of the High Line, Took the Staten Island Ferry out past the Statue of Liberty, then changed hotels, before going to see Beetlejuice the musical. On my one evening off from the conference, I walked from the conference venue in Brooklyn to my hotel in China Town, via the Brooklyn Bridge, as the sun was setting. I started in daylight and ended in the dark, so watched Manhatten light up as I crossed the water. The biggest regret I have is not making it to the Metropolitan Museum of art, or into just about any other museum. Hopefully, I can get back there one day to manage that.
