Stress Reduction, Colored Card Bases, and Pursuit of Missing Photos

First up, my new favorite toy in my craft room:

A stress-reduction sound machine. My favorite setting right now is Ocean. I bought this beauty on Monday, when my children were driving me up the wall with their bickering and whining. Summer's not half-over, folks, and now I'm so much calmer after spending a half hour in my craft room drowning out the bickering and Pokemon battle noises with this lifesaver. If you need one, I highly recommend you run to Target and get one.

Today's cards are on colored card bases and use my new Mehndi Medallion set from Papertrey. What a very cool set. Yippy!!!! Or should I say, "Ohmmmm." Yeah, that works better, doesn't it?

The pink card above uses the large, medium, and small medallions, although there are a few extra-small ones in the set that I haven't used yet. The inks are Memento, and the papers are SU's pretty in pink and chocolate chip, with a random white popped on dimensionals. The sentiment is from Clear and Simple Stamps.

The baja breeze (SU ink and cardstock) card is cleaner than the first, using just the large medallion, and has a slightly smaller white panel. The sentiment is another from Clear and Simple Stamps.

Okay, the mystery of the missing photos deepens. A number of you have had problems, and a few have figured them out. Others are still as baffled as I am; certainly the feed shows normally for me in both Google Reader and in my email, so why in the world wouldn't it show normally for everyone? It's a mystery.

Here's what I've learned...any one of which or all of which or none of which might be true for you. The answer could be something completely different, which is entirely possible because I am VERY much out of my element with tech stuff.

1. Some email programs have security settings that block photos from downloading automatically. I use Windows Mail and I get a bar across the top of emails asking if I want to download pictures. I click the bar, and the photos appear. For other programs (or different settings in Windows Mail), if you right click on the photo box, a drop-down menu might appear offering you the option of downloading photos. If neither of these work, check your security settings to see if there's some other way to get photos. At least two people have fixed the problem this way.

2. Some of you just started experiencing problems in the past week or so. I assure you I am doing nothing differently, so the mystery thickens. One reader suggested using Edit mode to add photos to the post, so I added the sound machine photo in Compose Mode and the card photos in Edit Mode as a test. If you have been experiencing this problem, PLEASE LET ME KNOW if you can see any photos on this post and tell me which ones. If this is the problem, clearly there's a code difference in how they load, and perhaps there was a browser or Blogger or Feedburner change that's invisible to me but affects the way the photos show depending on the code.

I read all the code on the photos on this post (what the heck does it all mean?!?!), and it's definitely different depending on the mode in which the photo was loaded.

Thanks so much for all your patience and help in getting this problem solved.