I purchased this fine example of overseas engineering, the Craftsman Battery Powered Sprayer Wand, from Amazon on 29 March 2024 for the princely sum of US$36.55, which includes tax. I purchased it because I could no longer spend long periods applying weed killer from a mechanical, manual sprayer. Even though I’d switch from hand to hand, and only used any one hand for no more than 10 minutes, by the end of the day my hands pretty much hurt like hell (arthritis tends to do that to you as you grow older). So I decided to buy one of these. I purchased it because it had the official Craftsman logo embossed on the side, and I’m old enough to still be drawn to Craftsman the brand. Silly me.

When it arrived it included batteries, which I immediately put into the wand and started to work. True enough I spent a number of days applying weed killer, enough so that the yard smelled like a big salad. When it was done I packed everything back on a shelf so that nothing would happen to it. Silly me.

Imagine my surprise when I took it all down today to do a bit more weed killer application. It wouldn’t work. Batteries I thought. Florida weather is hell on batteries, so I put in a fresh set of AA batteries. Still wouldn’t work. I wasn’t particularly amused by these events, especially now that the rainy season is in full swing here in Central Florida and the weeds are growing visibly day by day. I can pull and weed-wack til the cows come home but I still need to apply that weed killer magic known as 20% vinegar. I didn’t want to spend more money on yet another sprayer then wait for it to ship and I needed to do the work right now, so I started to take Craftsman sprayer apart to see what, if anything, was fixable.

As you will note above, the case is simply two halves of thin plastic snapped together. It took little effort to separate the halves and to see the interior “mechanism”, which was nothing more than a simple switch, motor, plastic tubing to carry whatever you need to pump, and a place to house the AA batteries. Note that the outer part of the switch, the gray item, does two tasks: push down the switch for motor power, and push in a physical valve on the pump (the cyan part at the top of the motor) to allow fluid to flow. Why it was designed and built this way isn’t too clear, but here we are.

When I put in the batteries and just pushed down the electric switch, I heard the motor thump. That meant the physical pump itself was physically blocked from turning.

I pulled the motor/pump assembly out of the handle and removed the top of the pump mechanism by removing three Philips head screws. Two of those screws also held the pump to the motor. Once the top was off the pump mechanism you could immediately see trash within the pump gumming up the gears. The pump uses a pair of gears as impellers to move the liquid, and they’re covered with a black material. I thought at first the gasket was disintegrating due to the 20% vinegar being pumped through the mechanism, but after pulling out the gears and washing everything out, the gasket was still in excellent shape. I can only assume that there was trash in the bottle of liquid itself.

After cleaning the pump, reconstructing everything in reverse order and putting the original batteries back in, the pump worked as before and I got a bit of work in before the skies clouded over and the rain began to fall again.

I won’t recommend this item to anyone, and even if I did, you couldn’t purchase from Amazon anyway as it’s now “currently unavailable” and Amazon doesn’t know when it will be back in stock. In the mean time I’ll keep it limping along until I can find and purchase something more rugged.

As for Craftsman, the brand has become so diluted by this kind of crap that I can’t recommend Craftsman either. I still have the much older Craftsman tools I still use around the house, but those tools came from the 1960s and 1970s, first as gifts from my parents, and later as purchases when I was first starting out into the world. They’re still in superb shape, which is a testament to the high quality Craftsman once had.

Red the color, real red, properly rendered red, is hard for digital camera sensors to capture without aid. Or at least it was for me. But I now have a new camera with a newer sensor than any other camera I currently own, and it would appear that this new sensor and its accompanying CPU is capable of doing the best job of capturing red so far. This is one of many, many red Hibiscus blooming in my garden right now. I was hoping it would begin to attract humming birds, as humming birds are supposedly attracted to red. But I’ve yet to see any so far this season.

Image straight out of camera, JPEG only.

We throw away far too much in this country. It’s not enough to sort the garbage into recyclable and non-recyclable. We have to find ways to stop throwing away anything and everything. One small way we’ve started was to try to compost the vegetable matter, which to be honest hasn’t been all that successful. But that’s me learning to do it correctly.

Another way to minimize waste is to find another use for it. For about a year I’ve been taking the parts of the vegetables we eat and attempting to either save the seeds they might have, or in the case of carrots and green onions (amount others), get them to grow again. In the case of six carrot tops where I cut off of the tubers, I put them into a container with a bit of water. All of them have started to sprout green in my very simple starting container (a recycled 30 oz Temptations container). No, those carrots won’t regrow the tuber portion, but the lovely green that’s coming up will leaf out further and, given time, bloom. And if they’re in my backyard garden with all my other flowers then perhaps they’ll help to attract and feed butterflies.

In addition to green sprouting up, the carrot tops are also growing roots around their edges in the water.

One reuse that has worked out just fine are green onions. The hanging pot you see before you has five clumps growing new tops. Every time I have I cook a recipe that calls for fresh green onions I go out with my kitchen sheers and cut off about a dozen, then go in, wash them, then cut them up into small pieces for cooking or garnishing, or a bit of both. And to make it even sweeter (financially) I no longer have to rush to a grocery store and buy a new bunch when I need some. I just step outside my back door.

All of this is leading into my starting a small raised garden in the back this year for other vegetables. I’m looking to raise tomatoes, bell peppers, pole beans, and perhaps small squashes. I don’t know how the coming weather will effect our efforts to grow anything in our garden, flower of vegetable. But I have to try. Our back yard is a very small green space with a huge live oak over everything. I need to keep it all watered. In addition to the butterflies we also have a number of bird feeders for the smaller songbirds in the area. I’m always thrilled to see red cardinals flitting about, as well as a number of butterflies of all sizes and colors. And then there are the flowers blooming.

My wife and I went out Monday morning and discovered this snake skin hanging out of a hole in a sycamore tree growing in our front yard. This is another example of letting things live to support other organisms. I know we have a number of black snakes around the yard. This sycamore used to grow straight and tall and was a classic shape and height. Over the years it’s been growing in our yard it’s lived through a number of hurricanes as well as quite a few major thunderstorms. The top of this tree was taken out a decade ago with a direct lightning strike. Rather than have the sycamore taken down we decided to let it stay. It still leafs up every spring. It’s also become home to a number of birds, one of which appears to have made a nest in the hollow bole in the tree. This is also the start of mating season, so some bird flew up into this bole with this snake skin which had been shed earlier by one of the resident black snakes. I can only surmise that when we came out front that morning we startled whatever bird was trying to incorporate this snake skin into its nest. As a consequence it hung there out of that hole long enough for me to take a few snapshots. The snake skin was gone the next morning, I assume having been pulled up to finally be incorporated into a nest up in that tree bole.

In the past I might have propped a ladder against the trunk and then gone up to peek inside. But now I’ll leave well enough alone. Let whatever is making its home up there do so without my interference. Hopefully if any new life comes to pass up there I’ll see it emerge. Then perhaps I can take some photographs of the event. But if I never see anything, I’m thrilled to have at least seen this happen.

New Years Eve was another traumatic event for all my little guys. As usual the neighbors set off their purchased fireworks, starting almost as soon as it got dark, and continued past midnight. I have a lot of little visitors snuggling in next to me while all the booms echoed through the neighborhood. When the festivities ended they slowly moved off to their regular sleeping spots for the rest of the evening.

The morning and the day were spent with everyone in the household napping and resting in general. They were all happy for the quiet of the day as well as the very pleasant sunny day. It hit 80°F today, not bad for the first of January. Everyone was outside of the house and around our screen-enclosed lanai (patio). I have discovered that the cats in particular are quite content to stay within the enclosed area, as long as they can go out and watch what’s happening on the outside of the screen. And that’s fine by me, as it keeps the cats from roaming around the neighborhood and considerably reduces their chances to pick up parasites such as heartworm.

Finally one from the garden. The hibiscuses have been blooming again, along with my azaleas and some other flowing plants. That means getting out in the garden pronto to get things weeded and replanted.

Everything taken with the 75mm on the Pen F.

Modest flower photos from my garden. Some of them taken in the morning, the last in the evening before the sun finally set. The common thread to all is the way the light plays on them, or through them. Jewel-like colors everywhere these days.

My garden is now another pleasure of retirement. Since I can’t go visit public gardens such as Orlando’s Leu Gardens ( https://www.leugardens.org ) I’ve been trying to create a little of the magic in my backyard. My wife and I go and purchase flowers that we then try to plant in our back yard. Most of the time they make it, but sometimes they manage to die on me. The primary goal is to plant as many butterfly and hummingbird attracting flowers as possible, and then nurture them along to keep them as healthy as possible.

I’ve also started to put bird feeders up around the garden. I have a large one that I can’t seem to keep the squirrels off of, and I keep threatening to bring it back in the garage to get rid of the squirrels. The two smaller ones seem to be squirrel proof, and the birds are always flying in to feed. We have at least two cardinal pairs in our yard now, and I see other smaller birds eating in them as well. The larger feeder is staying for the time being, as the squirrels will fall off eventually and then the smaller birds swoop in for a bite.

Another common thread is these are all out of camera JPEGs. To quote Marc Beebe, RAW files “are for people who have way too much time on their hands. A camera should be able to produce an acceptable image without any processing.” ( https://marcbeebe.wordpress.com/2020/05/06/the-x10-factor/ ) I agree. I don’t have time to screw with tweaking RAW files from any camera any more. Take a little extra time and get it correct in the camera.

The title is the name of this miniature rose growing in my back yard garden. Being a miniature, I have it growing in a pot that allows me to move it indoors as well as outside. After weeks of depressing news I thought I would post this to add a little positivity to the blog. Gardening and housework are what I turn to now more than ever. It definitely keeps me busy, and I have enough material on hand that it keeps me from spending. When I get tired, I just stop for a moment and sit out in the garden and enjoy the weather and the view.

Taken with the Panasonic G9 and the Lumix 30mm macro at f/2.8 during the golden hour. JPEG moved off the G9’s memory card onto the blog via the WordPress app on my iPhone and the Apple SDXC-to-Lightening adapter.