Regular Reflection

I want to commit to regular updates but a weekly schedule feels too frequent, so I think I’m going to try to to do monthly retrospectives. If I feel like something is significant enough to share, I’m still going to allow myself to make update posts in the middle of a month – the main thing is I want to make this a regular reflection exercise.

Mushroom Mania

Growing oyster mushrooms has been a fun experience. The first fruiting was pretty small and the fruits were pretty bland but still distinctly mushroomy. For the second fruiting, I moved the substrate outside and placed it facedown in a little garden plot. The fruit produced this time had a significant apricot aroma and after cooking actually reminded me slightly of the smell of oysters. I didn’t actually add any nutrients to the substrate block, so I’m thinking just the microbiota in the soil were mainly responsible for the difference in taste and aroma. I can’t imagine significant nutrients were present in the soil let alone able to be taken up by surface contact. There must be a commensal relationship between the mushrooms and soil microbes – maybe comparable to our gut microbiome: we give bacteria a place to live and they aid digestion and provide nutrients we can’t or don’t produce in abundance. This must be a big reason why pasteurization is preferred over sterilization. I’d be interested in the future to run a few different variations in parallel, controlling which bacteria are introduced to the substrate and their effect on flavor and productivity; I haven’t looked too thoroughly, but I haven’t found any research yet that precisely controls introduced bacteria – all I’ve found are comparisons of sterilization/pasteurization.

Housing Help

I’ve been wanting to focus more on WebDev and get back into using the Angular framework, so I talked to a friend to get inspiration for a project. I’m now working with her to develop a map of housing affordability across the US. I’m excited about it because it provides an opportunity to learn more about housing inequity in our country and it’ll give me a better idea of places I could live. I definitely want to find a place to settle down long-term as soon as possible, so I can start building my own infrastructure.