Cherry blossoms, April 8, 2025

 

Last week was warm, but that didn't last. This past weekend was particularly rainy, and then temperatures dropped back into the 30s and 40s on Monday and stayed there. Still, the cherry tree buds have been prompted to blossom, finally starting to unfurl today. Will the birds allow me to have any cherries this year? Or will they once again eat them all before they fully ripen? Time will tell.

Forsythia, March 29, 2025

 

Forsythia are one of the first things to bloom in my yard each year. (Daffodils were already in bloom a week or so ago, but I didn't get any photos and they're probably spent already.) When I came home early Saturday morning I saw that the buds on the bush by my back steps were ready to burst open. Saturday's temperatures in the 70s gave them the push they needed to open completely - many of them, at least.

Soon the irises will blossom, and the cherry trees, and the azaleas, and the rhododendrons. Maybe I'll try to document them once again.

For my mom on her 91st birthday

 

Hydrangea blossoms, all from the same bush. The blue ones were picked in early August, the purple one September 6th. The goblet is courtesy of my nephew and his wife.

My mom died a little more than six months short of her 90th birthday. This was a milestone we had tacitly hoped to see her reach. Her own mother had died just a few months after her 88th birthday, while her aunt, her father's sister, had died at 90. But it was not to be.

Today would have been her 91st birthday, and I wonder what kind of shape she would be in now if she had not contracted COVID from an unmasked ambulance crew and shortly afterwards had a massive and irreversible COVID-induced stroke on Valentine's Day 2023 that resulted in her death eleven days later. I spent the last few years of her life allowing her to live as independently as possible, but in truth she was very dependent on me for many of the daily basics. Our goal had been to keep her out of a nursing home, but during her time at the Allied rehab center she very much enjoyed the attention she got from the nurses and staff there.

But it seems likely that at this point her physical diminishment, had it continued along the path it was on, would have resulted in her needing more intense and focused care than I could provide. Had she lived this long she would have experienced the deaths of two more of her beloved cats.

We all miss her and love her every day, and will forever. I told her as much during my visit today.

UPDATE, 9/15/2024: I realized after I picked these purple-mode hydrangeas that I had not taken any photos of them on the bush when they were still blue. Today I came home after a brief drive and discovered one - or maybe two - new blue blossoms among the purple.

Site maintenance needed

I noticed that most of my posts for this year up to the end of May that had photos are now missing some or all of the images. As I realized late in May, this came from using the easy but dangerous new copy-and-paste method of adding photos to Blogspot posts, which actually just hotlinks to the photo source. If anything changes with the photo source - in this case, the photos I had downloaded to Facebook albums - the link becomes broken, and the photos vanish. Not all of them, not all at once, but enough of them to be a problem requiring that I reupload them all directly to Blogger. So I have a LOT of photos to replace.

Sunset mystery

I was scrolling through the photos on the SD card from the camera I keep in the car and I came across one that I initially assumed was just another sunset image taken from the street in front of our house. Then I looked at it more closely and realized I had no idea where it had been taken.

I'm confused by the odd lights, the strange chimney thing on the middle right, the odd geometry of the dormer on the house to the right of center. Where was this? It was taken February 2, 2017. What was I doing at sunset that day?

I discovered a clue while uploading the photo: at bottom left are two circles with the words "BURGER KING" in them.Was this taken from, perhaps, the parking lot of the drugstore across the street from the Nanticoke Burger King? Next time I'm there, I'll have to check to see if the details match.

Susquehanna at Pittston, May 5, 2018

I am tired and need to get to bed, so here's a photo I took on May 5, 2018 from the deck of Brews Brothers in Pittston a little after 6:00 PM. The day was bright,if a bit overcast, and the sunlight was glimmering on the Susquehanna, but the camera chose to interpret the scene as one of grim foreboding. What the hell, I'll take it, I thought. So here it is.

Magnolia

Nothing new has blossomed today. The azalea is still on the verge of blooming, but the switch from sunny warm days to gray skies and rain has stopped it for the moment. So here's something I'm pulling out of the trunk, so to speak.

Last Friday I went for a walk around the neighborhood to see if I could locate the source of the shingle that came through our window. (I think I found it.) While I was out I noticed that a magnolia tree a few houses down has started to lose its blossoms. So I decided to get some pictures.

May 4, 2018

I've posted a photo of this tree once before, thirteen years ago. Here's the original for comparison.

April 25, 2005

It's...not that much significantly larger. It seems to have lost a secondary trunk, on the right in the second photo.

The view from below, looking up.

The view from below, looking down.

The blooms on this magnolia are nearly spent. But we'll see what blooms next.

Life finds a way

No new blooms today. Still waiting on tulips, lilacs, and azaleas, and rhododendrons and irises are a few weeks away. But the sun came out for a few hours this afternoon, and I decided to take advantage of the natural light to grab some photos of things that have been around a while..

Not sure what this is, but I was glad it stopped flopping around in the breeze long enough to stay in focus. If you were putting together a wildflower bouquet, this could substitute for Baby's Breath.

Violets, so tiny and low-growing, easy to miss, easy to just mow over.

Once again, high-contrast monochrome brings out detail that color obscures.

Last year I cut down a Black Walnut that had sprung up between the composter and the shed to be over eight feet tall in just a few months. This year the part of the trunk I left on the ground is covered with these handsome shelf fungi.

Even yet more forsythia blossoms.

Moss on a cinder block.

Lichen on a cherry tree. (Probably Flavoparmelia caperata.)

Grape hyacinths.

Bonus shot: wispy clouds in a sunny sky.

Dandelion closeup

The image of a dandelion I posted yesterday was a low-resolution copy. Here is a high-resolution version. It's easy to see that this humble little weed that adds such an amazing brilliance to our yards and gardens isn't a single flower, but a composite cluster of numerous smaller flowers. Click on the image below to see a large version.

The ghostly high-contrast monochrome version, while slightly blurred (an unfortunate side effect of taking freehand extreme close-up photos of flowers that bob and sway in the slightest wind), reveals some interesting details not obvious in the color version.

Reshoots

Me, after coming home from work 45 minutes late, taking my mom to physical therapy, going grocery shopping, scouting out a new view from Holy Trinity Cemetery, and taking my mom home from physical therapy: I'd like to go out and get some photos today, but I don't really feel like running out again. Besides, it's not like there won't be any more sunny days.

Me, a few minutes later: To hell with that. Tomorrow is never guaranteed. There may not be any more sunny days. Get those photos now.

So, with the sun rapidly sinking in the west, I went back to the cemetery and reshot the Nanticoke Panorama from a slightly different angle, and with much better lighting:

Click to zoom. See original post for details.

I then ran out to the Shickshinny Boat Launch (latitude 41.178696, longitude -76.106361 - put that in Google Maps and you'll be able to see exactly where I was standing) and took some new photos of the Susquehanna from more-or-less the same place I took the original image back on April 1:

Overall, I'm glad I went out and got these photos. I'm glad I didn't presume to wait on another sunny day.

Old family photos

About eight years ago I dumped some old family photos to Facebook. Back then Blogger's interface for adding photos to posts was slow and cumbersome. Now that they've made it easier, I've decided to archive these here on my blog as well. I'll try to add descriptions and content at a later time.

UPDATE, July 2, 2018: Put not your faith in simple solutions. I used Blogger's copy-and-paste function using photos I had posted to Facebook. But this doesn't actually copy and paste anything. Instead it hotlinks the photo from the source into the blog post. And if anything happens to change the address of where Facebook stores or indexes the photo - poof, no more photo on Blogger.

So the next solution is to download the photos from Facebook to a file, and then upload the photos the old-fashioned way into Blogger. This then stores and indexes the photos wherever Blogger stores and indexes photos - which is fine, until that gets changed, too.

Susquehanna from Shickshinny Boat Launch, April 1, 2018

This was taken around midday on April 1, 2018, facing west by southwest. I wonder how the same shot would look at sunrise, or sunset? I'll have to check it out sometime.

Untold tales: NEPA BlogCon 2016 afterparty

October 15, 2016. We had just ended the very successful NEPA BlogCon 2016, and made the hike from Scranton to Pittston for the afterparty at the Susquehanna Brewing Company. Fun fact: most of the time, I really suck at parties and social occasions. I usually find myself tracking down the resident dog and having a lengthy conversation. Unfortunately, there were no dogs at the Susquehanna Brewing Company, just people with whom I should have been able to make easy conversation. Eventually it occurred to me to go out to my car, get my camera, strap it on, and start taking pictures.

Over the afterparty: Creative skywriting, or a bizarre meteorological phenomenon?

I wandered over to the brew vats behind the band in the back room where our party was set up. These fascinated me: great hulking industrial things like the vats of nickel sulfamate I had worked around during my time as a CD Plater. But instead of huge plastic tanks filled with a bright teal liquid, these were gleaming stainless steel tanks filled with beer.

I lined up some photos and thought about Margaret Bourke-White, who turned industrial photography into high art.

I wandered around a bit more, grabbed some pizza and cake, and showed my photos to Karla Porter, one of the organizers of the NEPA BlogCon. Her mother happened to be with  her, and when I told her what I had been doing, she said "You know, if I were taking these photographs I might do them all in black and white."

I stepped back, stunned by the absolute rightness of her observation.

Several other brewpubs have opened in the area. I hope to maybe someday photograph their setups - if they're anywhere near as photogenic as the ones at the Susquehanna Brewing Company.