I love the snow. Here, with the mountains, trains, rivers and all the wonderful Japan-y things everywhere, the snow magnifies the already supreme beauty. When I got home, this is the view I had out of my patio window:

I only had a moment to snap the shot, as the train was just stopping briefly in the station, so I had to use my cellphone, which was in-hand. I’ve photoshopped it a bit to remove some of the distortion caused by a shitty cellphone camera, but if you can mentally enhance the image a bit more, you may get a slight idea of how pretty it actually was.

Scenes like this make me cry that I can’t be a full-time painter right now.

(By the way, a number of you have been pestering me for photos of my new haircut. Well, I don’t usually take photos of myself, but this time, you’re in luck; my manager wanted to take new photos of me for the website since I lost weight and got a haircut. So if you browse around the Aeon Takefu site, you can spot a few shots of me mugging for the camera.)