7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Where are you and where are you going?
7Wannabe5
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Well, if that is true, I currently have a whole lot of marching power piled up in reserve. My sister just posted a picture of me from a few years ago which is indicative of how I would prefer to look now, so I am going to make it my screensaver.

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by Alphaville »

reserve marching power: yeah, tapping into it is the hard part :D

anyway, looking forward to your construction updates also--what's next?

7Wannabe5
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

what's next?
Demolish back porch, rotted flooring, damaged wall paneling and insulation, some ceiling drywall, broken/rotted windows, damaged exterior trim, gutters, and siding. Evict raccoon, clear filthy insulation from attic. Rain chains and rain barrels. Hopefully, 20 yard dumpster over two weeks will get it done. Once this demo is done, I will have better idea about extent of wood rot and condition of crawl space/foundation/plumbing components. This knowledge is necessary to inform next next steps. I may also be able to borrow shredder to clean up huge pile of tree debris and eye poking branches. My arm is still sore from vaccine, so we’ll see how it goes.

Married2aSwabian
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by Married2aSwabian »

I think I posted elsewhere that I cut sugar, in all of it’s forms, out of my diet about seven years ago and dropped 15 lbs in a month! Didn’t change anything else at the time with regard to diet or exercise. You go through some withdrawals for about a week and then it’s easy. Hard part is shopping: it’s in 99% of the processed shit you can buy in the US.

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by Alphaville »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sun Mar 14, 2021 7:51 am
Demolish back porch, rotted flooring, damaged wall paneling and insulation, some ceiling drywall, broken/rotted windows, damaged exterior trim, gutters, and siding. Evict raccoon, clear filthy insulation from attic. Rain chains and rain barrels. Hopefully, 20 yard dumpster over two weeks will get it done. Once this demo is done, I will have better idea about extent of wood rot and condition of crawl space/foundation/plumbing components. This knowledge is necessary to inform next next steps. I may also be able to borrow shredder to clean up huge pile of tree debris and eye poking branches. My arm is still sore from vaccine, so we’ll see how it goes.
have you found a humane way to deal with the raccoon nest yet? i can't picture you as someone who enjoys killing stuff.

and is your first dumpster full, or are you still working on it?

branches: mulch?

7Wannabe5
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Married2aSwabian:

I have tried going off sugar completely. Withdrawal lasts MUCH longer than week for me. Like week 6 I will still be having dreams about cookies that wake me up. Also giving stuff up completely pings my rebellious nature. Much easier for me to simply count each jelly bean of calories and meal plan forward. I can make myself do stuff much easier than I can make myself not do stuff. MMV and almost certainly does on this forum :lol:

@Alphaville:

I’m going to try lights, noise, peppermint oil, and male raccoon scent. If that doesn’t work, I will have to wait until I get the attic floor joists shored up to take further measures. It’s nesting right over a small section of dropped ceiling I need to remove anyways, so if I was super brave, I could just start pulling it down and directly evict.

This will be my third dumpster! I keep underestimating the quantity of refuse and speed of fill. I’m certain that I will need at least one more later on in the process.

All the branches etc will be shredded/chipped for mulch for garden. Not all permaculturists approve, but I love wood chips so much I’ve even considered buying my own chipper. I also have tons of last year’s leaves to process into my lasagne compost. The garden soil looks pretty good, but I’m not wanting to do extensive battle with grass, so I am going to need a lot of dumpster cardboard too. Good thing about urban gardening is that scavenging other people’s refuse towards your compost is easy.

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by Alphaville »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sun Mar 14, 2021 9:29 am
@Alphaville:

I’m going to try lights, noise, peppermint oil, and male raccoon scent. If that doesn’t work, I will have to wait until I get the attic floor joists shored up to take further measures. It’s nesting right over a small section of dropped ceiling I need to remove anyways, so if I was super brave, I could just start pulling it down and directly evict.

This will be my third dumpster! I keep underestimating the quantity of refuse and speed of fill. I’m certain that I will need at least one more later on in the process.

All the branches etc will be shredded/chipped for mulch for garden. Not all permaculturists approve, but I love wood chips so much I’ve even considered buying my own chipper. I also have tons of last year’s leaves to process into my lasagne compost. The garden soil looks pretty good, but I’m not wanting to do extensive battle with grass, so I am going to need a lot of dumpster cardboard too. Good thing about urban gardening is that scavenging other people’s refuse towards your compost is easy.
holy moly, 3rd dumpster! 🤯

lights at night? so, waiting for power connection? will you get your own or from neighbor like @riggerjack suggested?

noise: ultrasound pest repellent? do those work?

male smell? what does it do?

can you trap and cage and release in the woods or no? can you get help from humane society or something?

wood chippers you can rent from home depot btw, no need to buy/store/worry about.

7Wannabe5
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

It’s better to motivate a nesting female to leave on her own, because then she will carry off pups herself. Mixed reviews on lights, noise, peppermint as effective. I will use led battery lights or maybe some blinking noisy toys from the Dollar Store. The male raccoon scent is reviewed as more effective, but is also stinky for humans. Apparently, male raccoons are threat to pups, so scent is worrisome to nesting females. Raccoons mate yearly in late winter, but do not form pair bonds. All raccoon moms are single moms with bad ex-and-future boyfriends. My biggest difficulty will be that it is pretty much impossible for me to keep the house sealed up tight against raccoon re-entry at this point in the rehab. Braver than me professionals will gather up the pups, put them in the trap to bait the mother, and then transport or euthanize. Raccoons will attack humans to protect pups.

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by Alphaville »

so better to motivate her asap, before birth?

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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Likely too late for that.

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by Alphaville »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sun Mar 14, 2021 3:19 pm
Likely too late for that.
oh noes :lol:

then do all the rest first and wait for eviction as final act? once the pups have grown a bit?

ertyu
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by ertyu »

It's my strategy - we're raising this clutch of pidges and then i'm cleaning that balcony before pidge seniors can settle down for clutch number 2. Let's see if it works. Wish luck w raccoon.

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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by DutchGirl »

It's amazing how much progress you've made!

I hope that you get to serve an eviction notice to your raccoons soon!

Here we've just installed a bird's nest box. Hopefully we'll see some small birds use it this year. Maybe we were too late for this season, then hopefully next year. The Dutch Bird Protection society has a couple of cameras aimed at a couple of types of birds' nests, and I love watching those. The slechtvalk (peregrine falcon, apparently) has a nest waaaaaay up high, if you click on roostercam you can see it (rooster is a noun in Dutch, meaning grid - so it refers to the metal grid in front of the nest).
Last edited by DutchGirl on Mon Mar 15, 2021 6:46 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by Dream of Freedom »

Did you ever find the window sashes? There are YouTube videos on how to make them.

7Wannabe5
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Alphaville wrote:then do all the rest first and wait for eviction as final act? once the pups have grown a bit?
The not-well-supported dropped acoustical tile ceiling of the "conservatory" where the raccoon is nesting is dropping lower on a daily basis. I am kind of a raccoon-spirit individual myself, so I would like to delay, but I don't know what will happen if/when I start jacking up the living room wall. I will try to post pictures later, but the situation is such that raccoon feces are actually falling out of crack between sagging ceiling and wall, kind of like an oversized hamster cage suspended in the air with only a cardboard bottom.

@DutchGirl:

Very cool. Species identification hikes are one of my nerdy old lady hobbies (I even have a Dora the Explorer style hat which I wear :lol: ) I intend to maintain at least a few of the very big old maples in my new yard just for the fall foliage and the fact that birds love them.

@DreamofFreedom:

Nope, I only found one and it was completely rotted. Thanks for the tip. I have been pondering all sorts of alternatives to having to either spend $$ to buy some crappy vinyl inserts or $$$$ for wooden replacements. The house has way more windows and doors than usual for being only 480 square ft plus odd porch/entry structures (it's gloomy now because boarded up, but should be very sunny when opened), so I was thinking that maybe I could make some of the windows fixed picture windows without violating code requirements for egress. The attic staircase entry room and the kitchen access entry room are both pretty lopsided relative to the main structure, so just tearing them down would likely be a recommended solution, but I like the security added by having two layers of exterior doors. I have already figured out how I am going to hook up a video floodlight security system which is also linked to rain barrel water sprayers. Basically, I am going for the Macauley Culkin "Home Alone" type security system with maximum 2020s technology. Of course, a big dog with a collar A device that converts some barking to the voice of James Earl Jones might also prove effective. We'll see. So far, nothing bad has happened except that a couple of kind of shady looking metal scrappers came by and asked if they could search my dumpster.

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by Alphaville »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Mar 16, 2021 8:30 am
The not-well-supported dropped acoustical tile ceiling of the "conservatory" where the raccoon is nesting is dropping lower on a daily basis. I am kind of a raccoon-spirit individual myself, so I would like to delay, but I don't know what will happen if/when I start jacking up the living room wall. I will try to post pictures later, but the situation is such that raccoon feces are actually falling out of crack between sagging ceiling and wall, kind of like an oversized hamster cage suspended in the air with only a cardboard bottom.
ok, this is literally a shitfest, and i feel i must speak up.

this needed to be resolved sooner rather than later. you're past due at this point.

besides the destruction, you or others can get sick from this.

get a pro to catch and release asap. nothing can be gained from further delay. the longer you postpone, the worse and more expensive and more dangerous it gets. for everyone--including the raccoon.

/2¢

--

eta i should add that by your current description this sounds like something urgent screaming for action, whereas before it read as just something smelly and annoying and slightly hilarious (piss).

but a collapsing ceiling, fresh piled up feces dropping, etc... that seems like it has crossed a line into biohazard territory.

i was just looking into regulations, etc. and how euthanasia might be required. ooof....

anyway if you manage to do the trapping yourself and skirt killing requirements, here's a thing:

https://www.raccoonatticguide.com/relocating.html

ayayay... best wishes with this. stay safe/healthy.

https://www.raccoonatticguide.com/fecesdangerous.html
☝️please note removal + disinfection gear + protocols
--

eta2
if all else fails burn the house down :x :lol: :(

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

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7Wannabe5
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Well, I found out yesterday that my DS32 already survived a raccoon attack, so he’s not afraid of them and will help me. Approximately one person in the U.S. has died from raccoon related illness or injury over the last decade, so evicting a raccoon is not nearly as dangerous as grocery shopping during Covid with only a cloth mask. It just seems more dangerous. Just like it seems less like you are eating dead animals for protein when they are microscopic animals involved in fermentation or root nodule nitrogen fixation by legumes.

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C40
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by C40 »

IMO, if you have a correctly sized distance weapon (for example, a .22 rifle), you should just use that on it. There are plenty of raccoons.

Don't get too close.. They can become fierce. One of my old coworkers grew up pretty rough, and he had a pet raccoon when he was young. At work, a raccoon had gotten in the warehouse at a different factory. A guy cornered it, and tried to grab it or catch it in a net or loop, and he got bit. The coworker said "you just need to get a ball of aluminum foil and toss it near the raccoon, and then you can catch it in the net"

My dad had some battles with raccoons at his house. Sometimes he would catch one in a trap (it was pretty simple and probably didn't cost much), and sometimes he shot at them. Even though they lived in some part of his house, he didn't see them very often, so it was a big deal when he did.

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Alphaville
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Re: 7Wannabe5- Take 7- The Money Dimple

Post by Alphaville »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Wed Mar 17, 2021 5:28 am
Well, I found out yesterday that my DS32 already survived a raccoon attack, so he’s not afraid of them and will help me. Approximately one person in the U.S. has died from raccoon related illness or injury over the last decade, so evicting a raccoon is not nearly as dangerous as grocery shopping during Covid with only a cloth mask. It just seems more dangerous. Just like it seems less like you are eating dead animals for protein when they are microscopic animals involved in fermentation or root nodule nitrogen fixation by legumes.
im not afraid of racoons, but of ascariasis, giardiasis, leptospirosis, etc. not a quick death but a slow illness that may run undetected. the real threat is the toilet. please be careful with that. i've had parasites before, from working in the jungle--not fun!

eta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baylisascaris_procyonis

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