Eight Days A Week

 The Air Quality Index (AQI) tells you when it's healthy to go outside.  For eight days last week, here in the Columbia Basin, which is called a "basin" because it's basically a big geological bowl into which air can settle (and under the right conditions--such as an inversion layer and no wind--stay put), the AQI was often off the scale.

This does not work well when the air in question is full of smoke from Pacific Northwest wildfires.

Here is what a normal sky over Richland looks like:

And this is what it looked like for eight solid days in a row this past week:

The AQI informed me every day that it was either "Very Unhealthy" or "Hazardous", both of which meant "DO NOT GO OUTSIDE."  There were no dog walks.  Except for one quick trip to the grocery store, there were no outings of any kind.  It was so bad that I put on my facemask with the special microparticle filter just to open the door to let the dogs run in and out to do their duty.

It was clearly a good week to draw chainmail.

Aziraphale, the angel character from Good Omens, turns up in medieval armor during a flashback scene (all the back to 537 AD...he's an angel.  He's immortal, and has been on Earth for quite a while).  Naturally, a fun historical costume called out to me as a drawing challenge.  Could I draw chainmail?  

Or at least, enough of a semblance of chainmail to make it look like medieval armor, more or less?

I'm not sure what I was thinking.  I mean, look at how complex it is!

And how much of it there is!  Not only that, his outfit has lots of shiny metal, and a feathery fur cloak.  

So it was a good thing that I had oodles and oodles of time, stuck indoors day after day after day, to work on this piece.  

Somewhere around the third day, I lost track of where I was in all that chainmail, and wound up having to just make it up as I went along.  By that time, I was slightly boggle-eyed anyway, and much of it became a little blurry around the edges.  

But hey, I drew nifty feathery fur, and the shiny metal turned out okay, and all in all, it was worth the effort.  And I'm sure my eyes will get back into normal focus any day now.

After that, I drew a picture of Crowley in about two hours.  It was quite relaxing.

Also, during one of our Zoom sketch sessions, I drew this Hornbill eye:

And then I spent the next 48 hours checking and rechecking the AQI for our area.  

At last, on Saturday morning, I awoke to clear blue skies!  The air was healthy again, so I tossed the Hounds in the car and off we went, hither and yon, on more than one walk, to make up for all that idle time.   (Yes, I did try to exercise during the Big Smoke -- I put on some rocking blues music and danced around the living room...and discovered how much my knees have changed since my twenties).

During one of our walks along the riverfront, I spotted a bunch of painted rocks.  The one above said "Mountains on My Mind" on the back.

This one was hiding on a kiosk:

Pippin was not impressed by the rocks...

Truman showed a distinct lack of interest as well....

During a half-mile or so stretch of the trail, I spotted all of these lovely rocks -- obviously, other people get creative when stuck indoors, too.  

Well, that was certainly a different kind of week.  

Hope you have a smoke-free week, wherever you are!