As the Garden Grows

What's blooming today?


You are here: Home / Archives for items

Artistic watering cans

by

PSHunt
Grab the Scavenger Hunt code.
Photo Theme.
Join the blogroll.
Visit participants.

This weeks Theme is Fake

IMG_0196

When I saw this weeks Photo Hunters theme I thought to myself “what can I photograph that represents fake”. I had no idea. Sure, I could have done some obvious things, but I like challenging myself.

Luckily, my husband and I some time on Saturday to go to Toronto’s 40th annual outdoor art exhibition. My nephew just graduated from the Ontario College of Art – specializing in photography and he had a booth at the art show where he was showing his photos.

He never even shows his immediate family, his parents, his photographs, so we figured it might be years before we’d get another chance to see his fabulous photography so we went to the show.

I had no idea it would be so large! There were 500 artists exhibiting everything from photographs to sculptures in wood, glass, clay, and stone, pottery, paintings, prints, metal artwork and many other forms of art.

I brought my new SLR camera with me and as luck would have it I found some “fake” artwork that would be perfect for the Photo hunter theme.

Now, I know I’m behind in posting my photo hunter photos (on three sites) but I think I found great items to post.

The photo above is of watering cans. Clay or pottery sculptures. They are not functional but they are lovely aren’t they?

I took a lot of great photos on Saturday, many of which will be perfect for this site – funny garden related sculptures. You’ll love them. Watch for them in upcoming posts.






Get a warranty from SquareTrade

by

Have you ever purchased something online from eBay or even a retail store and then later wished that you’d purchased a warranty for the item? Or perhaps you are like my husband and I and you purchased an item but the extra warranty offered by the store was just so expensive that you balked at paying such a high price for coverage that you might not ever use?

That’s right. Chris and I purchased an HD video camera and a Digital SLR camera from Best Buy this past Sunday. The two items and accessories cost us well over $3000. We were offered extended warranties for both items, but do you know how much those extended warranties would have cost us if we’d purchased them? Close to $800! That’s almost a quarter of the price that we paid in total for the two electronic items! Geez! We could get a new washer, dryer or even a desktop computer for that price!

This is where Square Trade comes in. SquareTrade offers warranties on electronics and appliances at 30 to 50% below retail. It doesn’t matter if you purchased your electronic item or appliance online or in a retail store you can get a warranty for the item.

Now if Best Buy had offered their extended warranty at half the price that I just told you about we might have purchased it. It’s there loss I suppose. Now that I know about SquareTrade I’ve looked into the warranties that they offer for the two items that we purchased and the warranty prices really are about half the price of what we were offered at the retail store on Sunday.

The website states that warranty claims are served within five days and that they do not charge for deductibles. You can also cancel or trade your warranty at any time.

The site looks pretty easy to use. Go to the main page of the site and click on the “Get a Care Plan” button, or the “Get a warranty” button at the top of the page.

There are two columns on the page that you are brought. One if for an item purchased from a retail store and the other is for an item purchased from eBay. Pick the correct button and begin filling out information as to what product you purchased as well as the purchase price and date if you bought from a retail store, or simply fill in the eBay product number if you bought from eBay.

Once you fill out your information you’ll be offered a warranty for the item. Once you’ve read the information on what you are being offered you can purchase the warranty.

If you do purchase warranties through SquareTrade you’ll be able to manage your warranties and any claims you make towards those warranties online via the SquareTrade system.

SquareTrade covers items purchased from online and offline stores such as Amazon, Dell, Sears, BestBuy, Circuit City and many more. Plus, you can buy warranties for any times that you purchased in 2007. It doesn’t have to be a recent purchase as far as I can tell.

Warranties are only available to buyers in the USA at this time. Being in Canada I won’t get to try out the SquareTrade service, but if you are a US resident you might want to take a look at what they have to offer and decide if purchasing a warranty via SquareTrade is right for you.

Fun with sprinklers – not!

by

Chris and I are both experimenting with lawn watering the other night. He was wiped out because he’s covering another persons shift at work for the whole month so he’s getting up at 5 a.m. every day. I’m still not feeling well, what else is new, and that’s made me pretty much useless as far as getting anything done outside goes these days.

So … we pulled out the sprinkler system that we have. We actually haven’t been very happy with lawn sprinklers as none of the ones we’ve purchased in the past have worked very well with our not very powerful water system.

Chris hooked up one of our older small sprinklers after work and the darn thing swung around pathetically and only watered perhaps a 6 foot diameter of lawn and garden. It’s going to be thrown out or perhaps if we have a garage sale it will be one of the items that we put out for that.

So, seeing how bad that sprinkler was and after calculating that it would take about 8 hours to water the front and back Chris got in the car and went to Home depot to get us a new sprinkler.

Miracles of miracles he actually found one that works! The new one has a good range and seems to work well with our low water pressure. It still took about two and a half hours to complete the job but considering that neither of use were up to standing outside in the garden, in the heat, for a minimum of an hour and a half we’re happy.

I still prefer to water my plants by hand. Well with a hose, but you know what I meant! This was better than not watering at all!

Have you found that they don’t seem to make really good sprinklers anymore?

Meta