Vacuuming Beijing in homemade kneepads

Its June. June!!!!!!
Bloody hell it seems like about 4 days ago we were in the middle of winter and it was minus 4675 degrees, skin was sticking to the inside of my dual layered winter trousers (they don't exist) and if you open your eyes when outside your eyeballs freeze and turn into novelty golf balls.

Yet, now its June. We have had days and days of over 30 degree heat, humidity like the inside of a sauna and sunshine that came all the way...from....the...sun. But alas, the summer is over and outside now resembles the grey dark days of 1940's Birmingham, with grey clouds behind grey rain on top of grey streets. Its very grey. Here is a photo of Winnipeg today...

Winnipeg June 1st 2018.

 OK, that might be actually be a photo of a bloke with a vacuum of some sort, near the Birds Nest Stadium in Beijing, China. But it COULD be Winnipeg.....

Anyway, its dull outside here today, but luckily I have a job that allows me to gather my belongings in my steel shelled rocket ship and travel about having adventures. A bit like Columbo, Madge Gellen or even the famous Captain Cock. But I will hazard a guess and bet you 5p that none of these or any other famous explorers of past, present or future have had as much adventure as me this week

(Cue weird wibbly wobbly time dilation thing like in Wayne's world......)

So, yesterday I had an experience with both sides of religion. The good and the bad, Light and dark..  - You decide which is which.

I was helping install a phone system in the basement of a church - We had already pulled some cat5 cable (Actually made from 5 cats)  through the ceiling/floor joists to where the system was to be located but to actually mount the kit onto the wall we had to move a full size crucifix - Made of wood, with polystyrene painted brown to give some texture and mounted on a steel plate stand it stood about 7 feet tall and looked.....'USED', it definitely wasn't your average, nice clean religious 'god is great' crucifix that you normally see. More like a 'We calmed the bible down so as not to scare anyone, but it was really brutal, dirty and a bit like mad max' kind of crucifix. - I guess it might have been used in a realistic adult Easter celebration of some sort. I was tempted to try it for size, but I know some people may have found it off putting and rude, so I just took some photos...

So that was that. Afterward I had to crawl under the building next to the church to pull some cable for one of the phones. It reminded me of the old army days, when, because of my diminutive size, I was always the one to climb onto a roof, under a building or be thrown over a wall (This actually happened many times). In Afghanistan once, I had a similar job pulling cables under a building where we knew there to be Scorpions and Camel spiders. All you could hear was the scratching of claws on stones as you worked in the sticky hot darkness. Fun.
Luckily, the 'Hell', under this church in rural Manitoba, wasn't quite as bad - Dusty and dark, but with my homemade knee pads (Buffy's old bra, a t shirt and some Velcro) a head torch and gloves all that happened was I got dirty and sweaty. It was fun though and better than working in an office all day...

Under

Not too comfortable

Homemade knee pads - Really Comfortable

So that was a nice way to spend a morning! When we finished we saw a blackboard that the church kids had drawn on so we added ourselves to the picture..

Us pulling cable (Chalk on blackboard)

Also earlier in the week I had an install in what used to be a bank or money vault. The building was a grain store years ago, but has been turned into offices. One office still had the big steel door that used to lead to a vault of some sort and downstairs, the phone equipment had the same. It would make a great place for locking 'people you disagree with'...

The entrance to the upstairs office

and the downstairs vault...

In the same building I found a sign that would have been used in Iraq to let the locals know not to get too close to US Military vehicles - I have no idea what it was doing or how it made it to Winnipeg..

Also - Is this hand drier automatic or not!? (Clue - It isn't...)

In other news we finally got to clean up the sealant around the bath (Yeah, I know  - How interesting) It made a bit of a mess, but the bath normally looks like this when I get out..

Buffy also tried on some weird wrap type clothes with Ross the alien and and put some other tiny clothes into drawers, boxes and onto tiny hangers - This has nothing to do with babies, its just a phase she is going through.

I also took a picture of a train (from above) the sky (from below) and us (from the front and slightly down)

Us from slightly down

A train from above

The sky (from below) 

These captions for these photos are lazy and didn't want to do what I told them. I suppose with a childish child like small child on the way, I should either be more coaxing in my instructions or just live with it. Ho hum.

Looking forward, Buffy has just over 5 weeks till she finishes work to take a lazy holiday for a year or so. She is soooo looking forward to it and so am I as we can start to meet up for lunch and stuff!

Also, next week my old car goes back to Hyundai where they will clean it up and sell it off to the highest bidder. I will be generously allowed to choose from virtually any car currently available on earth. I am thinking of something like one of these beauties....

Cheap on tires and a free watchdog.

Watch out for foxes (Ask Gareth)

Just crap (Ask Chris)

Egg roll!!!

I will show you a real photo image still picture captured with electrickery and wizardry of my new super fast travelling machine next week when I have one... It will be worth waiting for.

Honest.

Yarp.