Fotos Restored (I Hope); Progression of Seasons

Most of today's fotos show late November in my yard. Here, the pink impatiens, an annual nearing the end of its life, is matched by tiny pink flowers on one of what I call "weedflowers" overarching the impatiens.

Google's Help Forum narrowed down the problem I was having with fotos. When you change the visibility setting on an album, all the URL's change. I discovered that my album Blogpix10 had, without my realizing, been set up as "Public on the web". That may be Picasa's default. I did not intend just everybody to see those fotos there, only in my blog, especially in that someone had left on Picasa a request to use a foto that I just did not see until after the event had passed. I want people to contact me for permissions thru email, not leave comments at Picasa. So I changed the visibility setting to "Private", thinking that would let me control who sees pix. Unfortunately, that setting did not give me a URL at all to insert into blogposts! So I changed the visibility setting again, to "Anyone with the link", which does give me a URL. But that created all new URL's for the 400+ fotos in that album, which caused all those fotos to vanish from the Web, affecting all posts back to the beginning of September!

Here, some leaves of the wisteria climbing my front porch are turning yellow. Others stayed green until killed by severe frost, whereupon the leaves curled up and dried out, but stayed green. The heavy-plastic bracket to hold my flag at about a 45-degree angle broke, but I discovered that the curlicues in the wrought-iron support for the porch roof are perfect for holding a flag, at least at a 90-degree angle.

The fix that the Google employee proposed, to set albums to "Anyone with the link", did not, however, restore the fotos already posted to this blog. So today I reset that album to "Public on the web", and the fotos reappeared. I haven't checked every weekly archive (clickable in the white space of the right frame to this blog) back to the beginning of September, but I did check several, and the fotos seem to be OK. What a relief.

My largest chrysanthemum was blown over by a severe windstorm. Here, the lite-green area is touched by the rising sun while the rest is still in shade. The flowers are dark red; other colors than green are fallen or changing leaves.

The Google guy also suggested a different way of putting fotos into my blog, but still using Picasa. It didn't work. Don't you just love it when instructions tell you to click on something that isn't on the screen you see?

The English ivy on the left is evergreen, as are several other things in my yard, including a hardy bamboo.

Procession of Seasons. I mentioned here exactly one year ago today that something odd has happened with the weather in recent years, with typical weather of the next season starting weeks before the astronomical start of that season.

[I]t's not technically winter yet, tho you'd never know it from the temperatures — I see a progression of seasons at work in recent years; late autumn has been like mid-winter; mid-winter has been more like early spring; let's hope this year cleaves to that recent form[. (Since it's cold already, so I hope it gets warm early.)]

The purple haze in the right center of this foto is a weedflower that puts out hundreds of tiny blossoms.

The blogpost last year concerned an annual carol-sing event at the Cathedral. Did I miss this year's too? I must ask Gaetano or Joe if they want to go with me to the Cathedral Basilica for midnite mass Christmas Eve. I have been told that, unlike with St. Patrick's in NY, you don't need to get tickets in advance. I went once, with my older sister, to St. Pat's, and since neither of us goes to church regularly, we were trusting on being able to watch the people ahead of us to know when to stand, sit, kneel. But we were put in the first row! so had to look sideways to know what was going on. I'm a little concerned that since I cannot kneel due to knee surgeries, I might be thought disrespectful if all I can do is stand or sit. Maybe there's a special section for handicapped people. I must investigate.

Here, the leaves of some plant or other have turned red, but those of clematis vines are still brite green, and the little white flowers are braving the cold.

The Cathedral is an astonishingly beautiful building, inside and out. My post of a year ago shows 18 fotos. I was less than happy with the indoor pix because I didn't have a tripod, and the pictures did not come out as crisp as I had hoped. Looking at them today, however, they seem to me sensational, because the Cathedral is sensational even in slitely fuzzy fotos. Next time I take pix there, however, I must adjust the lite setting to incandescent, so the hue is not so orangy.

A clematis vine flowers amid fallen oak leaves. The blooms were relatively sparse this year. Perhaps the enrichment of soil I've done by heaping leaves onto the front yard will increase the yield next year. Now, if only the flowers came in various colors, not just white.

Getting back to the procession of seasons, what happened last year is happening again. We have had mid-January temperatures for a couple of weeks now, well before the start of astronomical winter on Tuesday. What is going on?

I have a big chrysanthemum, about 3 feet tall, in my front yard that does not start blooming until early December. I don't know how it's supposed to lay seed if it blooms so late. Typically, our first frost is about December 3rd, tho it was about six days earlier this year. All the bees and other insects that might pollinate a chrysanthemum have died or gone into hives or hibernation. (Hm. I wonder if those two words are related. (Pause for lookup.) Dictionary.com says no.) I show, today, pix of it and other late bloomers in my yard.

More startling to me was the fact that there were some trees in Military Park with cherry-like blossoms on December 4th! Here is a section of one such tree as seen against the wall of a building in the Park. As you can see, this is spring in reverse. In spring, blossoms appear before leaves. Here, blossoms are appearing after the leaves have dropped!

In this next foto, I show a closeup of one area of bloom. Those on the left are in sharper focus than those on the right. My camera is auto-focus, so there's not much I can do about something like that.

Who ever heard of such a thing? What kind of trees are they? In this last foto today, you can see one of the blossoming trees off to the left, and brown, fallen leaves in the foreground, so you know it's autumn, not spring. Very curious.