5/8/9 Prepping the River Mural

This morning, Fatima and I headed over to the school to begin drawing in the giant river mural. Our first challenge was finding a ladder, since the one we used yesterday has vanished along with the handymen it apparently belonged to.

Once we'd found another, we snapped in grid lines (lhumdullah for chalk lines!) and used them to scale up from the small sketches.

At noon, we broke for lunch - at the urging of a school staff member who wanted to be able to lock up the room with our supplies so that he could break for lunch. He promised he'd be back by 2pm to unlock the room.

We returned at 2, climbed back up on the chairs and ladders, and got back to work.

For a while.

While walking the couple kilometers between our houses and the school, Fatima had pointed out to me the massive stormclouds visible in nearly every direction. They looked thickest in the north, where sheeting rain poured down on the mountains past the lakes.

The wind blew from the east, though, where a few faint blue glimmers gave me hope that the storm might blow past us without quite hitting.

No such luck.

As I stood at the wall, sketching, I heard the distinctive sound of raindrops hitting the ground, but I didn't feel anything. I figured the storm was *about* to hit...but after several minutes of no change, I turned away from the wall and looked around. It took a minute to realize what I was seeing.

Rain was falling - heavily - everywhere I looked. I wondered if we were under an overhang, but a quick glance upwards showed that we weren't. Then I noticed a two-foot strip of dry ground hugging the west face of the building. The building whose west wall we were drawing on.

The wind from the east hadn't let up at all, so all the rain was being driven at an angle just steep enough that the building itself was keeping us dry.

Until the wind shifted.

And then we packed it up and made a dash for home, before we got as wet as the river we'd drawn. :)

Until tomorrow...