WATER FEATURE CHALLENGE - CONCLUSION My fountain is done. When I get up in the morning and open the porch door, I can hear the water happily chirping away. So what else is there for me to say? Quite a bit, actually. Final Schematics represents all the post installation changes. For one thing, I took apart and reassembled the fountain the next day. Why? I didn't like the way the top planter was sitting and decided it was easier to start over. Along the way, I also decided it w

WATER FEATURE CHALLENGE - 5 In any project, installation is one of the most exciting and complicated steps. However, because of my modular design, and because I took the time to prepare all the components ahead of time, actual installation took only about an hour - sort of anti-climactic. Only thing left to do was to cut the landscape cloth into a 20" diameter round shape and cut a slit on one side. Once that was done, I placed the large planter pot in the right position and

WATER FEATURE CHALLENGE - 4 I bought a house and inherited a jungle. When I moved in, I had a thick green wall of overgrown trees and shrubs, with ivy growing every which way, in the back of my yard. Privacy, yes, but no sunlight reached down there. Ivy is rats' favorite habitat and who knows what else was living in there. During the infamous "heat dome" in the summer of 2022, a lot of the vegetation on the sloped part of my backyard died. I had to cut down those shade trees

WATER FEATURE CHALLENGE - 3 A few preps were needed before I could start building my fountain, to prepare the planters, test the pump, and make sure all the components fit together. PLUGGING PLANTERS: The planters I bought had a drainage hole and came with rubber plugs. For the large planter, all I needed to do was to use the silicon sealer around the plug to make sure it was watertight. I let the sealant set overnight, and put some water in the planter to make sure there was

WATER FEATURE CHALLENGE - 2 Once I had the design worked out, I listed up all the items I needed. Here's the breakdown of what I used and their approximate cost. (I'm including an affiliate link whenever I purchased the item or saw the same/similar item at Amazon.com for your information.) Two Planters ($60) - These are the main features of the fountain, so I took the time to look around both the local and online stores. I wanted something with a nice shape, not too heavy, an

WATER FEATURE CHALLENGE - 1 No backyard is complete without a water feature - just the way I've always felt about it. But...a pond of any size seemed like too much work to maintain. I looked around for a small fountain but didn't find anything I liked for the price I was willing to pay. As the uncharacteristically cool weather continued in Southern California, I decided to take on the challenge of creating one by myself. But before I even got started, I had to make a few crit

It’s amazing how it gives you a different outlook to live without electricity for 28 hours – and over the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s not...

I was able to get surprising amount of detail with Moment's clip-on macro lens. In search of an inexpensive and flexible option to get a taste of macro photography, I typed into Amazon.com's search engine "macro lens for cell phones." It returned a handful of promising options (other than the cheap clip-on lens sets that I already tried and failed). I quickly zoomed in on the lens made by Moment, a company out of Seattle that specializes in mobile photography equipment, for

Once I got over the first sticker shock for macro photography equipment, I sat down and thought about what to do. $1500 for something I wasn't even all that excited about was out of a question, so the first thing to figure out whether I even really wanted to pursue it any further. That meant more googling for examples of macro photography beyond pretty flowers and bug-eyed...uh...bugs, and finally, I came across this: Instead of manipulating the scene or dwelling on technic

extreme close-up photography, usually of very small subjects...in which the size of the subject in the photograph is greater than life size Wikipedia "Micro photography??" was my first reaction when my evil friend Malik mentioned macro photography. "Maacro, not micro," he corrected me, and went on to explain that close-up photos bring out unexpected shapes and patterns in flowers, leaves, bugs, etc. They opened up entirely new ways of looking at things that are familiar. Wh