I have been unavoidably detained

Well I was pretty proud of myself for finishing up enough house renovation to go back to writing weekday Hugs and then BOOM!  Had to skip a week and a half.

Every time I take the train to see my aunt, I take pictures out the window of the bit of the route that overlooks Lake Ontario.  Then I e-mail them to my cousin (another niece) who lives in England now.  She loved that train ride and I love feeling like she's traveling with me for the visit.  She has been particularly impressed with the current batch of images, taken over the last several days of back and forth. I must confess I am too, so I thought I might force them on you guys.  It's not like I have any knitting to show you!

As you can see, the trips have been undertaken in crummy cold winter weather more comfortably spent at home under a blanket staring at the television. But: needs must, and now that the immediate needs have been addressed I can sit at my cosy desk admiring the shots I took.

It's kinda laughable to me, how much my cousin and I like these photographs.  My sole contribution is literally holding the phone up as straight as I can as I snap away, hoping to get a few images where the lights inside the train aren't superimposed on the images outside and stuff isn't too blurry.  A lot of them end up with small random light spots in the fringes... I see one in the picture above these lines, and another in the bottom left of the foresty bit below.

But somehow, quite a lot of them come out SO beautifully!  I kept about 63 of them... and I would show them all to you if I had more time to upload them so you can be grateful I don't.  I'm not sure why I'm so smitten, though I do think the colours are kind of amazing.  And the starkness of the trees against the clouded blue-grey skies... well, I love trees and clouds, so no surprise I love those shots. 

I was particularly excited to get this picture.  We were a few minutes out of Union Station and I glanced out the window, thought WHOA! The miracle is that I managed to dig out my phone, get the camera on, and catch the smokestack smoke almost at the centre of the image. 

I'm hanging onto these images in a special folder and when things are totally settled down again - there is more to do though thankfully, the immediate situation is resolved - I am totally gonna be trying to watercolour paint some of them.  Maybe not this busy industrial one though because that would be a ton of work.  But a nice tree scene... that'd be a very relaxing winter activity, don't you think?

Hope you've had a good week and a half and hopefully I'll be back to our regular meetups on Monday!