The window washers came today.

This morning Tim looked outside our living room and saw a bunch of ropes hanging in front of the windows. The ropes moved their way around our bay window until there were some in front of all the windows. A little while later there was a man hanging in our window. I thought he would be standing on something but he was just sitting on a little board and had a suction cup that he stuck onto the window to hold him in place. I took his picture and offered him a water bottle through the window. I was very excited because I asked him if he wanted water in Chinese. And...he understood what I said!!!! He took a drink of water, stuck the bottle in his pocket and went on working.

I continue to find interesting things about living in a high rise. One obvious one is that I can't wash the windows by myself. Thank God there are people willing to dangle from a rope so I can see through the window.

Another less obvious discovery that I made this week is that there is no place to paint something if you live on the 36th floor. At home I would just walk out the back door, set up a few boards in the yard and spray paint what ever I wanted. Since we do not have a back yard or even a balcony there is no place for this activity. I thought about going down to the green space/garden but I am pretty sure the management company would not appreciate me spraying the grass silver. And.....there were several items that I needed to paint and I could not imagine hauling them all down stairs to the ground floor. So....what does one do?

This painting job was not an artsy project it was a maintenance project. The metal shelves in our showers have rusted and so had our dish drainer in the kitchen. What I thought was going to be an easy fix ended up being a much bigger project then I expected. After living in China I should be getting used to things being bigger and more time consuming than conceivably imaginable. I thought I would just run to the home improvement store and get a can of Rustolium. The store had nothing similar to this product...so......I got a can of silver auto paint. I took all the shelves out to our trash can area, set up a box and put the "to be painted" item in the box and let the paint fly. This worked pretty well except for the paint dust that went everywhere and the strong paint oder that permeated the stair well. Oops!!! Sorry neighbors!!

The shelves look great and so does the dish drainer...I hope auto paint does not rust.....