Merry Christmas from Canada

Greetings from Coquitlam! These first three pictures are from a local park.


We also took a drive up the Sea to Sky Highway towards Whistler and stopped at several points along the way:



A couple of attempts at panoramic pictures (I'm having trouble getting them to format any bigger without getting blurry on this page. You can click them to get a bigger version):

It's Christmas time in the city...

While my sister was here visiting, we got Christmas decorations put up!

That combined with baking lots of cookies has helped it feel like it might be getting close to Christmas time :-)

There are some decorations up around the city, but it doesn't even come close to Budapest...

Thanksgiving

I went to Tallahassee for Thanksgiving. Normally I would have had my camera out taking tons of pictures of the food, but there were two other people with cameras out and I decided that three would be going overboard. However, I can't not have any pictures of food in a Thanksgiving post, so here are two that my sister Karen took:


While we were down in Tallahassee, my grandparents took us to Wakula Springs - and I did have my camera for that. There were lots of cool critters hanging out - alligators, turtles, a whole host of birds...and manatees!



The swamp is also pretty in its own right.

Catching up on November...

Yay for fall!



The trees here do a much better job of knowing that it is fall than the trees in Claremont did, but they still had trouble agreeing exactly when they were supposed to start changing colors/shedding their leaves. One tree was particularly confused and seems to think that since it has almost lost all of its previous leaves, it must be time to start making new ones...


Now, part of my goal with reviving this blog was to work on finding beauty in my urban setting. Focusing on trees makes for pretty pictures, but feels more like finding ways to avoid the city than finding beauty in it. Some of my earlier pictures reflect (hah) the fact that there are a lot of reflections in the city - having lots of windows will do that. This next picture shows that there are reflections beyond the ones in windows:

Night

The end of daylight savings time means that it is essentially dark out by 6pm. At least it means that it is less dark in the morning when I am trying to wake up.

Color

I have missed fall... It is nice to finally have it again.


Last night the buildings all appeared rather red as they reflected the sunset. This morning it was almost as though the buildings were trying to camouflage as they reflected the blue sky and fluffy white clouds.

Playing with Light

The sky cleared last night. This meant that the temperature dropped nicely so that it was rather on the chilly side this morning. In response, I got out one of my Budapest scarves for walking to church. Since the sky had cleared, the sun was out and making fun shadows. I was particularly entertained by the shadows formed by the fringe of my scarf. The sun being out also resulted in lots of interesting reflections.

Hello Again!

A lot has happened since I last posted. Most notably, I graduated from HMC and have moved on to grad school at Georgia Tech. I've been adjusting to living in a city again (and Atlanta is very different from Budapest). I have been working on learning to see the beauty in my new urban setting and, as part of this goal, I have been trying to figure out how to take pictures of cityscapes. To make sure this keeps happening, I'm going to try posting pictures here on some kind of regular schedule - I haven't decided exactly how often yet. To start off:
A sunset picture taken from the window in my apartment

I have also been discovering that there is natural beauty to be found in the city, you just have to be paying more attention: