On Friday I packed up my tablet and art gear in anticipation of moving to my new home.

Then Saturday we had flash flooding across the province and all of the roads to my new home washed away or had to be closed because they were five feet under. The family home also saw some flooding in the basement and I had to relocate my computer to the kitchen table much to the inconvenience of everyone. Especially my spine.

Basement is mostly dried out but the carpet will have to be tossed out. No word on the roads to my new home yet.

The full extension zoom is definitely soft and the camera isn't up for low light. The autofocus is, um, what it is.

I'll play with the settings and have it set up for telephoto best I can get it and use the Fuji for everything else.

The mushurgers (mushroom burgers) I've been making are simple enough to make and good enough (imo) to compete with chain restaurants like mcdonalds or burger king, and would probably be a much healthier alternative. (I could even substitute something else for the cheese and egg if I wanted to make fully vegan options.)

I've been using different kinds of mushrooms for these burgs, am gradually learning about their characteristics, like how shiitake mushrooms are very absorbant, and may need more "wet" ingredients for the mix, and king oyster mushrooms hold a lot of moisture, and need more "dry" ingredients to bind them all together.

This isn't concrete, but it's making me consider using part of the 10 acre land in Nova Scotia I've been making payments towards for a mushroom farm. Me and fellow community members could cultivate mushrooms there, grow our own mushurger ingredients, and even try out a food truck business to help sustain the community.

I mean I'm not personally interested in cooking for a whole bunch of people all day from a food truck, but I could certainly experiment with recipes in the kitchen using different mushroom varieties.

I cook with mushrooms enough that they've become a regular staple of my diet these days so it would be a good crop idea for me either wah, I'm just not that knowledgeable enough about mycology to start a farm for it.

I'd probably need enough consensus from the potential community and some mycological counceling and guidance first, I don't know how appealing mushroom cultivation would be for anyone else in the community, but it's an idea to keep in mind.

As a fuck you to corporate chains and intellectual property, if I ever start a food truck business for this, I want to also make the recipes and ingredients freely available.
my thought is that we could use the food truck like an experimental kitchen with the crops grown on our farms, but let everyone know how we make the food so they can do their own experiments if they want. Also, from the food truck we can also advertise our farm since it would be a source of the ingredients we use, and people could purchase any surplus crops from us for their experiments

Then, we could offer a system where people can share their recipes back with us, and we can offer a financial incentive for them to do so.
Like say someone shares their recipe for a new burg, we include it on the menu, and for each one that's sold, they get a percentage of the earnings for a short period of time, like royalties.

...agh wait, this just sounds like another intellectual property sort of thing.
I dunno. I just like the thought of allowing the community to be involved, and people freely* sharing information like recipes (with a reward incentive) without some secret recipe profit mongering bullshit.

I dunno. I really have something else I want to focus and work on for right now, but it's really easy to talk about the mushurger business idea when I'm doing daily experiments in the kitchen for my own nutrition.

I have a lot of ideas, some of which are probably good, but because I'm rather anti-capitalist, it's difficult for me to capitalize on them to develop anything like a business model.

hmu if you can help with that. You can contact me here or on my discord, though it's not very active because being social and managing a discord server is not one of my strengths.

I have a little over 1 year left until the Nova Scotia property (10 acres) is fully paid off, yet admittedly, I don't have any concrete plans for the development of the community yet. It would be nice to have at least something when the time comes, but that would take more people being involved in the project, what with it being a communal thing and whatnot.

ecn at CoHost asked;

Where to next?

Back home to Canada to hopefully get some work done on my spine. The chronic back pain of spinal stenosis and sciatica is why I'm leaving the job to begin with. I can't be fun and informative while battling a pain-fogged mind at the same time.

But I'm not so confident. Let me explain Canada below the cut... Assuming I can get a markdown cut to work...

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The Liberal Party and the Conservative Party are the two main parties of Canada. From the local to the federal level they've swapped control back and forth since the country was founded. They both hate the social safety net and socialized healthcare. They only let it pass in the first place because it polled well.

You see, "liberal" in the Liberal Party's name means economic liberal and not "leftist" like Americans use it. And the Conservatives want to be Americans. Both parties are corporate ass-kissers in love with corporate welfare and as a result they're spent decades undermining and mismanaging the healthcare system at all levels. Death by a thousand cuts.

The hope is to establish a for-profit healthcare system and scale back the government's involvement. Two tier healthcare. Private and Public. Supporters of this idea point to nations in Europe and Asia where this system is in place and works well. What they purposefully ignore is the above mentioned corporate ass-kissing.

Canada suffers badly from monopolies and oligopolies. Price-fixing is always a problem and increased costs for worse service continues to drain the pockets of the public. Nova Scotia Power, a utility no one can live without, is a government supported monopoly. Since they've taken over control of Nova Scotian's ability to keep the lights on things have gotten so bad that the grid will go down on sunny fucking day.

Now apply that sort of thing to you trying to not die of a heart attack. There's no way a private system will work in Canada because the two main parties have no interest in reining in the excesses of corporations.

We do have a third party, the NDP. They're the lefties who support a strong social safety net. But they rarely have experience in governing and the leader of the party is Sikh. And if there's one bit of bigotry Canadians can't help but indulge in, it's bigotry against Asians. Especially South Asians.

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Due to all of that Canada's healthcare system is collapsing. I would get things done here in South Korea. It's ridiculously affordable. But the sort of surgery I need done is the sort that makes it impossible to work. I'm a guest worker. Can't work? Can't stay. Back home it is.

Photo: Foggy morning in Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia. 2013. Pentax MX. If I can't get better at least I can go die somewhere moody.