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My son has just completed his first year in a fairly prestigious high school, the same one I went to twenty five years ago. For the graduating class, a committee is created that prepares the graduation ball that takes place this Friday. They have been planning it for months and have asked for volunteers from the parents from all of the kids at the school, irrespective of the grade the child is in.

The actual ball preparations began last week on Monday, and my first day to go and help was on Wednesday last week. I went directly from work and assisted with some painting. In the below photo you can see that some of the 'London Calling' letters have a black outline to make the letters stick out and some don't. One or more others painted the banner and this was what was left, so I was doing the black outline.

Here's a photo showing more of that same banner.

I assisted that same night in painting a part of another partially completed banner.

Saturday I went at around 16h45 thinking, based on a schedule, that I'd be working until 21h00, but they closed up at 18h00 so I did not end up doing very much. What I did do was to cut pool noodles in half, lengthwise, to act as the ribs on the Big Ben tower being built.

Last night I went for my third time and did a lot of the painting of the London Bridge. I won't go into the detail of what parts of it I painted, but here it is:

In the foreground of the above photo, on the far right, you can see a partial view of a ladder. After I took the above photo I climbed to the top of the ladder to take the next photos.

This first one (below) shows Big Ben with the pool noodle ribs I had cut glued onto it and all of it painted a primer coat. Today while I am work, the volunteers there will be doing the finishing painting. To the right you can see the bus.

Turning clockwise we come to the pub and the bar.

The angle on this next one is odd, but I took it to show you how in the center of the gym floor they created the 'arts center' where you picked up your paint or other supplies.

And then finally the next three show how some banners are hung from the ceiling and two others are up on the far wall.

I've taken the day off work tomorrow to help get the event set up, the ball is on Friday, and then on Saturday I go back again to help take everything down.

I figure to do this every year as I really enjoy this kind of volunteering.