Mountain Climbing · 4:08am May 7th
First order of business: I am open for Art Commissions! That is to say I've been commissioned a couple times in the past month and I figured I ought to announce that where I can. The uh... other account is what's been doing the commissions thus far, but I'm down to do more normal stuff as well. I'll take what I can get, but a piece could run from $10 to $50 or more depending on what you want. As always, you can see the cover art for a majority of my own stories for reference, and there's also my DA where I post things. Now then, on to the Weekend
However, I do want to do it one more time. Or more, honestly, I only spent about 3 hours doing it and it was a good time. the whole trail was a little under 2KM and the change in elevation was about 250 meters. It started with passing under a tori gate.
The first marker there says 'before the summit 400' and that picture was actually taken very late in the hike. there were a bunch of these and I believe there was one for every 100 meters you passed. The first one I noticed was the 1300 mark because that is when I first needed to stop for air. I had the sense to track the hike on my watch before starting, and man, I worked hard. maybe a little too hard. Had a very solid 210 heart rate peak and I was in that range for about ten minutes of my hike.
The hike was hard going up. Unstable footing, random stairs that were just tall enough and just wide enough to make me take two steps on each one and all the while I was dying. I'd carried a full liter and a half water bottle and a sports drink I had the good sense to buy at a vending machine right before the start of the trail. I stopped at a bench in the little clearing for the shine above and drank a bunch of that water, but I was still pretty motivated to continue upward. not my smartest move, and I probably should've rested for longer, but a few hundred meters above that was a parking lot for the long winding road that goes around the mountain to the observation decks.
The first of which the above pictures were taken from. You can see a majority of the city from here, and it is a lot bigger than I initially thought. However, the people here will tell you that it's more like 8 cities all right next to each other, but the American in me just sees one municipality. It's all under one border within Yamaguchi, so they all use the same trash and report to the same elected officials, but the 'districts' like to think of themselves as their own things. At least, that's how I understand it.
This was the other side of the summit where there was another observation deck. I laid down for about ten minutes on one of the benches on the decks since it was hidden from anyone not on it, but after catching my breath and drinking the last of my water, I walked around and took the above pictures. There was of course a shrine up there, and flowers of some kind that grew on the same bush and in three different colors, which was interesting. I couldn't read the big stone slab but I took a picture anyways, and after I'd seen everything, I started heading back down. Where the climb up pushed me to probably dangerous levels, the climb down was relatively easy.
I'm sure I made up those last 20 meters on the walk to and from the station to get here. It's not necessarily 'far' from my apartment, I could probably get there in 20 minutes if I had a car. the walk from the station to the trail itself was about 20 minutes, so there's that. Generally speaking, i enjoyed myself. I'm debating on whether I would have liked it more if it had been sunny. The sun makes it look nice, but brings with it heat, and I don't know how much of that I could've handled. I hit a runner's high coming down and it really felt like I didn't spend any time on the descend at all. I was half way through my walk back to the station before the high wore off. the watch says I burned about 600 calories doing that, so that might make up for the copious amounts of pizza and doughnuts I ate over the long weekend.
Previous to this little hiking trip, I ended up drawing a picture every day, and that is what drew me my first customer in a long time. While working on one of them, I listened through Andrew Wong's "Make your own rules," which inspired me to start a patreon or something. I have this comic I drew a lot of a while back, but came to a grinding halt on somewhere along the way. I ended up completing like 16 pages of it and there weren't many more left to do, but I ran out of steam and just gave up over winter break. Now that life is back into a routine, after I finish the two pieces I'm working on now, I'll be restarting that and polishing it up to a higher degree. It was a kind of messy 'I just want this out of my head' kind of ordeal at first and I didn't really want to put any effort into it, and it shows. However, unlike a story, I can just go back and draw over what I already have to improve it without throwing it all out.
Probably since March when I started cataloguing all my OCs, I've gotten up every morning to work on some kind of art piece, and I really enjoy the fact that this has become a regular hobby for me. I can't always just sit down and draw for ten hours every day, but to be able to do it a few times has made me remember how much I enjoy doing it. It's nice to have something come out well from start to finish with little to no problems along the way. I might even start trying to stream, but I'll need to make a new account somewhere for that... Regardless, art is back on the table.
And my other art has had some progress on a new Bright Future story made, but not as much as I'd like. In my canon, May 25th is Applejack's birthday, so along with a number of Applejack themed pieces I've done recently, I want to do an Applejack short story or two as well. I have one I started last year in the summer I never finished that I'm working on, and if I can just get that done, I'll be happy. If it does get done, I want it posted on the 25th for obvious reasons. For now, though, I never do my kanji drills over the weekend, so I'm still playing catch up on those.
Anyways, that's all from me for now. Feel free to DM me here if you want art done and can throw me a bone or two, and maybe new story this month?
Until Next Time~
-KCZ
At least you’re not the guy who had to be rescued off Mt. Fuji for altitude sickness… then rescued again for the same reason when he returned to retrieve his phone. And it’s not even clear whether he got his phone back.