Going for a Walk

I've been getting out and about more lately, and have been putting in my miles, mostly along the riverfront, though last week I encountered an obstacle:

The Columbia River was so high (from mountain snow runoff) that one of our favorite paths was partially covered with water:

And the beach was gone!  There is normally an 8-foot wide sandy beach at this point:

The water level has gone down now, nearly back to normal.  

The temperatures have been rising, though -- we're hitting the 90s regularly now, and even got over 100 once.  So I have to get up and get going by 7am to beat the heat.  Yay.

But despite the rising waters and rising temps, I managed to hit a personal goal last week:  1,000 miles in one year!

The Pacer Adventure Challenge app helped motivate me a great deal.  They offer virtual walks all over the world (which you can follow using Google streetview), from short ones (a 13-mile stroll around London, a 26-mile walk around Bangkok et al) to medium ones (49 miles in Iceland, 54 miles in Honolulu) to long walks (105 miles around Mont Blanc, 135 through the Colombia coffee plantations).

I've virtually walked all those and many more -- I've done 19 virtual walks in one year.  It was hardest in winter, when it was too cold or too snowy or too icy, and sometimes I walked inside my house for a mile or two, which is VERY VERY BORING.  But I managed to keep moving, as noted by the app's stats:

I even earned a special pin for completing at least one walk on each of the seven continents:

I shall try to keep up the walking even as we head into 100+ degrees here for the Summer.  Yay.

Okay, on to the artistic side of things.  Here is the one sketch I liked this week -- some sort of hook that I assume is attached to a boat at the other end, but this was all we got to see in the reference photo.  I used ink, water-soluble colored pencils, and watercolor to get the various textures:

 

I didn't like the other sketch our Zoom group did, so nobody gets to see it.  Hah.

But I did enjoy working on my newest Good Omens needlepoint project.  I used my own colored pencil drawing as the reference this time, of Aziraphale:

The chart was produced by putting the photo through the free pixel-stitch.net program.  To get the level of detail I wanted, the chart required 61,920 stitches!  (My previous three needlepoints were all around 35,000.)  Yikes.

Oh, well.  I decided to try it anyway.  Usually I work from the top down, but I realized the larger size would make that difficult, as the worked canvas would get too bulky as I rolled it down (I hate using frames).  So I worked out where the center was, and started from there, working downward first.  This is how far I've gotten after one month (15,000 stitches):

Assuming I'm able to keep up that pace, it should be finished by end of October.  And then I have another project in mind...of Crowley...that's also 62,000 stitches.  What larks!

Anyway, that's the report for now.  Have a great week out there, everyone!