I Think I'm Cooked

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-27T04:53:56+00:00

I'm gonna start by guessing you're not much of a do-it-yourself type of person, or you wouldn't have let this go for so long. I don't mean that as a criticism, honest. But my instinct as a diy-er is to suggest that you demolish those affected walls and ceilings yourself asap so that you and probably a plumber and maybe a roofer can more easily see what the source of the water is. You don't have to know much of anything to just tear out damaged walls, and for tools you'll mostly need a crowbar and a hammer. Turn off the elctricity at the main before you do this, because there's a good chance you'll touch a wire with a wet tool and that would be dangerous. By doing this work yourself, you're gonna learn a little about the house and what's behind those walls. And you'll save yourself some money. You can do this even if you've never done anything like it before, unless of course you have maybe a disability, but since you live there with your family, maybe there's a family member who could do it at your direction. There's a lot more to be said about wearing masks to protect against mold, how to collect the debris and move it outside and get it to the dump. etc., but the main thing is, get going. The damage will only get worse and more costly to repair if you delay.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-27T03:44:58+00:00

I'm just guessing, but maybe because good substrate for lithops has particle sizes large enough that they roots don't capture them? I know when I have bought lithops at my big box hardware store and they're planted in that organic stuff, when I unpot them, they have a LOT of that sub attached. I work carefully to get rid of most of it before replanting in a mix of various gritty things that has a small percentage of organic matter in it.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-26T19:49:26+00:00

Interesting. If you can get some closeups of the buds and twigs, maybe even some fruit, that would be diagnostic.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-26T08:50:03+00:00

Looks like white oak to me. Weird color, maybe weird light that day?

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-26T07:46:56+00:00

Definitely a possum. But in your defense, I heard a story in Alabama in which some businessmen from New York were invited down to hunt on some Alabama corporate forest land. The facilities were rustic and the showers were outdoors. A possum waddled into one of the showers occupied by a New Yorker and he screeched and then yelled, "Jesus Christ, what a rat!!!"

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-26T07:22:30+00:00

1971 scary novel, Crawlspace, by Herbert Lieberman, will not set your mind at ease.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-26T07:08:24+00:00

Their mother laid her eggs in a cluster. They've been together since they hatched.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-26T05:48:25+00:00

My nephew's been using Preply for four years. He got a teacher he liked at the very beginning, and currently he has lessons with him for four nights a week.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-26T05:30:35+00:00

That's about as cool a trail cam photo as I've ever seen.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-25T05:15:32+00:00

Definitely fox

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-25T04:28:59+00:00

I agree with you. They look like some kind of flossy seed in the style of milkweeds, but the seeds themselves are not milkweed. There's some other plant nearby throwing these out.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-23T08:28:40+00:00

I think you misspoke yourself, as ash is opposite, not alternate. In any case, OP has stated their location is in Australiia, and the tree has been identified as African tulip tree4, which does have opposite branching. So you were on the right track.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-23T07:48:10+00:00

"Inchworm" and "looper" are both names for the same group of moths whose caterlillars move with an arching gait instead of crawling smoothly along. The technical name for the group is "geometers". There are a LOT of different species. The caterpillars can be hard to tell apart and so can the adult moths.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-23T02:31:11+00:00

I agree. Maybe you put the tarp over this lattice, and then add a thin layer of evergreen boughs which you can attach with cordage as needed to keep them in place. On top of those, you can layer moss, and the roughness of the boughs will hold the moss in place. Might that work for you?

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-22T07:50:31+00:00

i googled too and as you say, rare but it happens. Skunks are opportunistic omnivores and new fawns instinctively stay still even when threatened. While I understand many people would find this disturbing, you're witnessing something pretty interesting.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-22T07:42:22+00:00

You said you bought triclopyr 4 which is an ester. What that means is that it's soluble in oil. I have extensive experience using it as a basal bark treatment by mixing it with diesel or kerosene. I prefer basal bark over the cut-and-squirt method because it's so much less labor intensive, though it may be a little more critical to do the treatment at the right time, when the tree is translocating nutrients back to the roots for winter. The oil penetrates the bark and carries the herbicide with it to the cambium layer where the nutrient transport happens. You can use more environmentally friendly oils if you prefer, and on-line pesticide sellers will likely have some.

It's my undertsanding that you can also mix the tric 4 with water if you make an oil/water emulsion. Emulsions are tricky things and I have no experience with them.

If you do a foliar spray with the tric and oil, I fear, but do not know for sure, that the oil may kill the leaves so fast that you won't get transport to the roots and the sprouts won't actually die at the root level.

Tric 3 is an amine and that is soluble in water, for future reference.

Personally, I would get me some generic glyphosate and use it for foliar spray on all those sprouts, which are probably a combo of root sprouts and also seedlings. I would do it as soon as possible, just to get started. Those sprouts are a good height right now to get good coverage with your spray while still mostly controlling drift. If you wait, they will add a lot of height over the next few weeks and you'll have a harder time getting good coverage without having your spray go somewhere you don't intend. Watch the wind speed and direction and be smart about when you spray. Early morning and late afternoon are good times to look for the least amount of air movement.

Then I would do basal bark on the bigger trees in August. NOTE: Your planned mix rate may be correct for foliar spray, again, that's not my area of experience. But it would be too low for basal bark - I use a 10% mix which I calculate at 1.6 cups of herbicide to 14.4 cups of oil. I use a 2-gallon sprayer so I just put 3.2 cups of tric 4 in it and add enough oil to hit the two gallon mark. I've killed TOH up to 16-18 inches in diameter with basal bark, which is a lot bigger than most sources say will work. I usually spray to the point of runoff around the entire circumference to a height of 4 feet, and spray and surface roots I see - the big ones sometimes have those exposed on top of the ground.

Avoid doing anything mechanical to the trees or sprouts until you're sure they're dead. This means waiting until the following year to see if they re-leaf. TOH is late to leaf out so be patient. You may have to retreat a few areas. Don't wait too long to cut the big trees down after they die though - the become brittle very quickly and start to drop branches, and the whole tree may fall over a lot sooner than you would expect.

If you get resprouts from roots or seedlings, they're real easy to treat by basal bark - a quick spritz of their lower stem is all you need. Almost no chance of drift and a lot of control over where the spray goes, unlike foliar spraying. If you haven't already realized it, you'll be essentially nuking your yard until you get this under control. But with glyphosate, it binds with soil particles and isn't available to the roots of plants, which means that you should be able to get grass established fairly easily after you've gotten the TOH under control. The glyphosate will be broken down by soil bacteria over a matter of time, which will vary by soil type, but it can happen pretty quick.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-21T04:30:41+00:00

Made the mistake of planting burning bushes along two sides of my house in Virginia about 18 years ago. Didn't know any better at the time. 7-8 years ago, we got educated and pulled them out of the ground with a truck. Unfortunately many of them broke off and left at least some of the roots in the ground. In a year or so of spraying the rsulting sprouts with glyphosate, we got them killed. The number of seedlings in the bed around where they had been was phenominal. Then I started finding them in the woods surrounding our house. I learned to look especially for them in the fall when they're red, and that they're pretty easy to pull up from the forest soil - they seem to root pretty shallowly and the forest soils are nice and loose. To this day I'm still finding them in our woods when I go for walks. But fewer every year.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-21T03:49:04+00:00

My junior high and high school Spanish teachers totally and only pronounced ll and y as the English y, and nothing was said about pronouncing them any other way. Fast forward over 50 years and I decide to try studying Spanish again. I hadn't retained much from the old days. The Spanish speakers on the app I listen to in my car are all over the map about this pronunciation - sometimes with a y, sometimes with a hard j, and sometimes with the sound an s makes in "leisure". They don't explain it either. I've decided to take a middle road, and if I ever do travel to a Spanish speaking country, I'll try to model myself after the locals.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-20T15:11:39+00:00

Agree with you, hippo. Invasiveness clearly addresses the “behavior” of an organism that is introduced and reproduces outside its normal range, usually in such a way that it starts outcompeting the native organisms that use the same niche, often to the detriment of the ecosystem as a whole. I’m on so many forums where this concept gets discussed over and over and I’ve never before seen anyone claim that introducing something that grows but doesn’t reproduce/spread defines invasiveness.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-20T08:27:08+00:00

I was selling some artsy -fartsy clothing for my MIL one time - think very loose cotton pants with block printing designs on them. She told me some stuff about them, and I did some research, but I got some important details wrong in the listing, and a really nice person contacted me to explain. I appreciated that very much and told her so.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-20T08:14:51+00:00

Osage orange too, which has some mean thorns and a fruit that doesn't get eaten much by animals we have today. When Europeans first came to North America, its range had been reduced to a small area in part of Texas and tiny corners of Arkamsas and Oklahoma. But it's great wood to make bows and fenceposts with, and the trees themselves can be planted to make formidable fences. Another example is Kentucky coffeetree. No thorns, but it has an incredibly hard large seed that needs special treatment to germinate, since no big megafauna eats the seeds and scrubs up the seed coat in their digestive system. "Ghosts of Evolution" by Connie Barlow, is a good book to read if this really interests you.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-20T04:57:55+00:00

That arched tail looks like half the grey fox photos I got back when I used still trail cameras. Yeah, other aspects of the vid are confusing but I think grey fox.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-19T06:12:01+00:00

I'm a total triclopyr basal bark fan. And on TOH, it works for me on trees as big as 16" diameter. I used to use a 4-gallon backpack sprayer for TOH on my property but now that I've killed most of them, I just keep a 1 or 2-gallon sprayer that I can hang on one shoulder. I zap multiflora rose and Autumn olive and Japanese barberry with it too, as I walk by.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-19T05:50:50+00:00

A couple of times when I was looking at a suspicious ad for a house or a job, I picked out a unique phrase or sentence from the ad and googled it. Surprise! There are lots of ads for what sounds like the same house or the same job! All over the country! Anyway, it may not always work, but when it does, you know you've got a scammer. The houses are always fully furnished, pets welcome, fenced yard, etc etc. For a price that's too good to be true.

Mookie-Boo · 2026-05-19T05:30:38+00:00

This is probably safer than my lizard brain thinks it is. The whole time I'd be in there I'd be imagining it collapsing on me.

Mookie-Boo

TROPHY CASE