Sarah Koster

I think my tree is dying. It appears to be infected with dutch elm disease, now around where the trunk and roots meet there's a stinky smell like boozy garbage. There's a spot with white foam coming out and hornets, wasps, ants, flies and other insects and/or arthropods are fighting for access to the spot. Pretty sure the tree is gonna fall over and maybe smash the shed. There's also a lot of liquid up under the roots where it looks like animal(s) have been excavating.
Anyway I took a video because it's kinda funky and just want to know if anyone knows more. Hopefully it works.

I also planted a pair of american persimmons, a few years ago, one is stunted but the other is over 12 feet tall now but I've not seen either of them flower. My soil here doesn't have good drainage, and someone decided to park a dead car next to them and make a huge pile of fill dirt on the other side so their conditions are not great, but some of the wild persimmon trees in the park nearby are not all that much bigger than my big tree except they produce fruit. My guesstimate is the smallest wild tree I've seen with fruit is about 20 feet tall and spindly, but my approximation is based on me remembering looking up at a tree in the past and could be totally inaccurate. I think I planted them as wips/bareroot maybe around 2015? It's taking quite awhile.

How much do you trust Scott's garden soil in the first place? I mean.... I wouldn't really trust their soil considering what other products they produce and market. Even feed suppliers like Purina have been known to "accidentally" include ingredients that are poisonous to the animals it's intended for... so I don't really see how something like soil that's even less regulated would be immune to corporate blunders. Like basically everybody already said, it looks like there's herbicide in the soil based on which plants are tolerating it vs failing to thrive. I would bet that the product you purchased just was not up to standard in the first place.

Stacy Witscher wrote:My point is that most dating sites have better filters than “like mindedness”, if the site you’re on doesn’t, find a better site.

I always end up with "your search returned zero results, try removing some filters" and I only had one or two filters, huge age range and very wide area search. There aren't really that many sites with a fair number of people active on them, and it varies regionally. I've tried almost all the mainstream sites/apps (other than the ones that charge $50 a month) with depressing results. I just end up getting fatigued either wading through profiles that aren't really narrowed down to a manageable/appropriate subset, or else trying endless combinations of filters to try to find the one man within 200 miles who doesn't think spraying agent orange on their lawn is a saintly deed.
For example my search might go something like this:
Age range: 30-50
Distance: 200 miles
Smokes? No
Drugs? No
Interests: Gardening
Hit enter
Sorry, your search found zero results! Try removing filters.

T Blankinship wrote:I was reading the posts and I remembered a job posting a few years ago. It was a job for a local TV station and I remembered the words "looking for like minded person to join our sales team".  This was at the end of the ad but it was still vague. Many years ago when I was looking for work a lot of the job description were vague.  It was at times hard to understand what the person who wrote the job description wanted. I feel the same could be said about writing a profile.  

Yes! Exactly! Meaninglessly vague, like a catch-all net thrown carelessly into the water, willing to drag anything caught onto the boat for inspection or slaughter.

Yeah I can see why your church had that kind of reaction lol, I wouldn't be able to explain it without sending this whole thread into the ulcer factory/cider press. At this point I understand that there is a lot that science isn't able to explain just yet, but I also am wanting more and more concrete reasons to base my opinions and actions on. Like I want to do what helps me survive and feel okay, not just whatever my impulses (or someone else's impulses, imposed on me) urge me to do. I had to learn early on that I need to be careful with when/how I share my emotions and my more "out there" thoughts, but there are definitely times when I cannot control it or I'm dysregulated and I say stuff in front of people who I'd normally not choose to say that stuff in front of. I don't think there is anything wrong with what I am feeling or saying, but I know that certain people will take it as an opportunity to hurt me.

When we had chickens, I put window screen over the windows and ventilation holes on the coop, to help protect the chickens at least at night. You wouldn't really need to cover the floor or even the run for it to help them to at least get to sleep at night. All I really did was to place the mesh up against the hardware cloth on the windows and staple it into the wood around the edges. A few mosquitoes will be able to get in before you shut it for the night, but they will stop biting after they have had their fill.

If you did drop a mosquito net over the whole tractor at night, enough weight to keep it from blowing away should be fine. Mosquitoes are not gonna try to wriggle their way under the bottom of the net, they just try to fly straight through and if they can't do that, they can't.

Also, you can close them up in the coop before it is so dark that you need to use a headlamp. If you put them away a little earlier, even if you need to "help them" go in to roost manually, you may be able to avoid some of the thicker clouds of mosquitoes. Chickens usually will go in to roost before it gets fully dark, but I understand if your schedule does not permit you to close up the coop until later.

EDIT
Is the portion with the hardware cloth floor elevated? I was picturing it flush to the ground, so I don't know if my suggestion would help. Not sure how easy it would be but maybe could cover the bottom with a poop tray that you can easily dump. if this is the case. It would be great to see a picture or diagram of the coop/tractor.

Yeah I agree at least textbook definition of "like-minded" has to do with similar values, but reality on online dating profiles it generally isn't accompanied by any explanation of what values they mean? So my inference is "values that lead to dating someone based solely on their profile picture" because the type of advertising I'm talking about is characterized specifically by a lack of any meaningful information.
Yeah I got kicked out of one church just because I wasn't in college anymore and it was a college church, but that pastor kicked out some of my friends before that, for various stupid and counterproductive reasons. I think he just wanted everyone there to look super preppy or something.

Pretty sure being on autism spectrum grants us some superpower that leads us to permies via allowing us to reject mal-adaptive folkways? My aunt seems to want to kill me because I didn't want to mow the grass or spray weed killer, and she tried to attribute my reluctance to "mental illness." Did not feel like re-traumatizing myself by trying to tell her facts.

Up until recently I was very rigid biblical-doctrine-only christian, but simultaneously not believing in hierarchy (I could write a damn good biblical argument for anarchy) so I think that was very unnerving for people who wanted to maintain status quo. But like... think of the Bereans. They didn't just take preachers' word for it, they checked scripture to see if what they were saying was consistent with the scripture, I felt like that was what I was doing but I got flack for it. Astrology definitely played a huge role in early Judeo-Christian ideas, all kinds of signs mentioned even in new testament. I still have knee-jerk reaction of "that's witchcraft" to it though, even though I'm technically more of a reluctant atheist at this point.

So really it is difficult to find someone who is "like minded" to a woman on autism spectrum who is simultaneously christian and cares about the environment and wants to live outside of the oppressive norm. It's also difficult to deal with the feeling of rejection when reading catch phrases in dating profiles that trigger feelings of rejection, or that create a question they don't attempt to answer. That whole "I don't belong here" feeling just swirls around and around like toilet water that never finishes flushing.

Yeah Kathy, male versions of our selves definitely do not exist! I think a lot of the problem for me is the huge gap between who I am and who I think I would have to be, for a man to want me. I actually really really like myself, but I end up feeling like I have to amputate parts of myself and invent others in order to make/keep a male interested? I think it's mostly caused by growing up in an abusive family, and only ever having dated abusive people. I have a deep sense of dread and rejection going into any relationship at all because that's what I experienced in my family; I tried to compensate by people-pleasing, and would lose myself entirely in relationships, being swallowed up by the other person's prerogatives and force of will. I wanted to make things work at any cost... and that cost was my self. But I felt extremely resentful at the same time, because people were taking so much of me, loving so little of me, and giving nothing back... So I have to fix my relationship with myself, to learn to treat my self as an end and not a means, to step into all of the awesome things about me without worrying about whether or not I can get my ovum fertilized before I reach menopause.

It seems that at least among women, there are a fair number with the redneck/hippie combo? But because of tolerance issues need to hide one or the other depending on which group of people we're around. My mom's family has some self-hating Appalachian roots, but my dad's family is mixed race which was never actually discussed as part of the reason for our general cognitive dissonance. I feel like a walking contradiction sometimes. My dad has old-world values and book smarts and my mom's family doesn't seem to have any values whatsoever, other than trying to look good, which I don't, and I don't see the point of. They were always embarrassed or ashamed and it was really easy for them to point the finger at me. I couldn't conform and couldn't even want to.
Anyway if I do ever find a partner it probably won't be state side? Just yesterday I answered the door and the guy asks if my parents are home. 36 and still get mistaken for a child here.... need to go somewhere where most peoples' secondary sexual characteristics are less pronounced so people will recognize me as an adult.

Anyway yeah I think the inverse clone of myself model of ideal partner is not going to work, ever. It could be possible to find someone who I like, who also likes me, who wants to live in a way that's compatible with the way I want to live. Asking for more than that at this point seems a little ridiculous, or like setting myself up to get hoodwinked or else find fault with a potential partner based on my inability to accept our differences/their imperfections. If I'm doing a good job of affirming and expanding on what I like about my own self, if I manage to earn my own trust, I won't need to get perfect acceptance from a partner in order to be happy with that relationship. I can't expect a romantic partner to fulfill my primordial child need for love and acceptance, and if they promise to be able to do that, they're probably just baiting me or delusional about their own healing powers anyway. Breaking from a lifetime of practicing self-defensiveness while constantly tearing myself down (the perfect defense combo against my narcissistic family members!!111 You can't insult me because I already depict myself as a worm!) takes a LOT of work, and distancing myself from certain people and situations. But I'm starting to feel like I can be okay for, idunno, the first time ever.

SO now I'm feeling like, these kinds of catch phrases like "like minded" are alienating to me for a reason, it's a red flag that the person is thinking about relationship in a way that's transactional, they have things they want to get, here is the list of what they have to offer, and I know I don't want none of that so it immediately shuts me out and shuts me down.

I think it's those changes in elevation with the terracing that really make it extra challenging to weasel-proof... Sure you can dig a couple feet down into topsoil that's more or less level, but what about with rocks and retaining walls and little cliffs everywhere? I don't know if I'd be able to figure out a simple solution, especially without looking at the actual site or having done anything similar in the past.