Air quality's been around 100 (not great, not terrible...) for a while. And I get to go out in it today. I was up at 2, and sad to say after Ken being over and after all the processing of the stuff he brought by and listing 10 things on Ebay, I was just plain tired and didn't do any drawing.
A couple days ago I watched the most excellent documentary on Vincent van Gogh, that has stuff in it about him I've not seen anywhere else.
And here it is. I want to keep track of it because there's a book mentioned in there that Van Gogh studied out of, and I'll have to watch it again with the closed captions on to try to catch the name of the author. It was a mid-1800s book of tons of "classical" drawings that the student was supposed to draw, gradually getting better through sheer hard work. Vincent not only was a real workhorse, but he copied shamelessly. His drawing, "Sorrow", is right out of that book!
That's another way I was screwed over as a kid - I was taught to never, ever "copy". But that's how artists learn! The Louvre used to be crowded with students and their easels, copying the Masters.
I surprised myself by being up in time for coffee etc and to get downtown to the bank and deposit my check. I got talking with the nice gal there, and she mentioned she wanted to get some pepper spray because she had an incident in the parking garage, been followed etc. It actually happened three weeks ago. I told her to try Big-5 and auto parts stores, and we agreed to both look for it, and if I find some I'll buy it for her and she'll just pay me back.
So yeah, there I was, in a bank, with a bandit mask on, showing two the two pepper spray weapons I have to the teller, one of which being gun-shaped. Pure 2020.
I went over to Whole Foods and locked the bike, and joked with the kids with their "anti-bullying" Cause-Of-The-Week(tm) booth out front, and went in and got 1/4-lb of roast beef and that beer in a can that's in the same colors as Arizona iced tea, hee hee. I walked over to the corner and set up and ate and drank, and a very persistent yellowjacket kept bugging me and I put little bits of meat out for it but this was a liberated yellowjacket who don't need no human to dish up their food, and I let it land on the roast beef and it chewed out a piece just as big as it could carry and flew off. Hilarious.
I left half the beer there for some lucky bum to find (it's cheaper to buy a tall can of that kind than buy 12-oz. bottle of something else) and walked over to Michael's Art Supplies and picked out a sketch pad because all these individual index cards are hard to keep track of, and looked at their pencils but decided what I have is just fine for now. So I just got the sketch pad.
I looked around at the restaurants a bit and then just walked back. There's an office supply store in that complex that might be worth looking in also, since I know they have "marker paper" that doesn't bleed when you use markers and I think some sketch pads.
I walked back and put my sketch pad in the bike bag and walked up to O'Reilly's Auto Parts and they had pepper spray, but the guy said, "But they're pink". I said that's OK; I'm buying it for a friend. So $11 got me a small pink pepper spray of the type that used to be $5 all day. Then I hit CVS for my vodka and a yard-long receipt promising all kinds of deals on stuff I never buy.
Finally I went to Whole Foods and instead of just buzzing around and using the restroom twice, I actually shopped, spending $60-odd on mostly vitamins.
I stopped by the Amazon hub for a few bubble mailers, and stopped in Japantown thinking I'd treat myself to some tempura at Minato, but even though I walked right in and was there in person, "All orders have to go by phone; you just dial that number over there, and it's good because it rings and rings...." I said I have to go out and lock my bike, and went out and got on the bike and left. For a treat, I should have picked up that duck pate' I was eyeing. At least I picked up some long skinny string beans from the dumpster on 10th.
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