Foiled by Jupiter's testicles

On standard time, it's pretty dark by the time TPP gets home, but after changing clothes and throwing some kibble toward the kitty girls, the lily pond's leaf skimmer net would surely need to be emptied what with the maples dumping a couple of tons of leaves during a day of rain.  Sure enough, the net was almost too heavy to lift.  But then in the fading twilight he notices that the cascade, usually a lively singing display was down to barely a trickle.  Drat!  TPP has been here before. This would be caused by one of Jupiter's testicles. Perhaps you don't know walnuts by this name, but there it is, Juglans. And the round black ones are just the right diameter to jam in the intake port of the pond's pump.  No problem really, except it's dark, and the intake is at the bottom of a black box filled with damned cold water.  After unplugging the pump, water and electricity together always makes TPP nervous, especially you know with Jupiter and lightening bolts involved, what could go wrong when you tempt fate so blatantly?  So you go fishing for the testicle, and almost get it, but because it wasn't being held in place any more by the suction, it slips away and is gone somewhere down there.  A futile fishing around for the offending spheroid continued until TPP could not stand the pain any longer, so the pump will remain off until this weekend. It's not as if this happens regularly, just twice before. The skimmer net is large and collects everything floating in, and then there is a brush filter, but when the pond is completely full from recent rain, and the skimmer fills with leaves, and sort of makes a dam against the brush filter, it provides an opportunity for the occasional testicle to bypass the barriers, float over the top, and play havoc with the water circulation. Either that or this was sabotage by a terrorist squirrel, always a possibility. 

A black walnut problem

Nuts!  Ages ago someone planted a black walnut tree on the property line way back there, or some squirrel helped increase the tree diversity by one species, but now it's there so you deal with it.  In general it's not such a big problem that it requires any action on our part, just don't plant any tomatoes close by.  Now this brings me to a current problem: the flow of the cascade into the lily-lotus pond was diminished and it remained so even after the massive filters were flushed out.  So the problem must be at the intake end of things.  One intake is in 4.5 feet of water, so the Phactor began by examining the accessible intake at the overflow gate. Both a net and a bottle-brush filter keep crap from getting to the intake, but somehow an immature black walnut had found its way in and it would get sucked up into the intake without totally blocking it.  You find all of this out by frogging around in the bottom of a pump box with your hand not quite knowing what you will find.  And that was all there was to it.  Remove walnut, plug pump back in, cascade flow restored.  Good thing that walnuts do not regularly fall into the pond and make their way past the pump defenses. Good thing it was just a pond pump and not the intake to a jet engine or nuclear reactor.  Good thing walnut removal is within the Phactor's technical abilities.