As I write this, much of the USA is in a "Heat Dome" or whatever they're calling this newest weather phenomena that is supposed to kill us all.  I was a Physics and Atmospheric Sciences major in college and don't recall us ever discussing these things.  I guess the science has advanced greatly in that field since then 🤷‍♂️ This really got me thinking about one of the latest projects I'm working on...

I'm pretty sure I've written before about how much I enjoy cold water immersion (Hey, AWeber, my archive page could use a 'search' function 😉).  If not, I'll just say that it's amazing.  I'm sure I'll write more about it in the future.

Whenever I'm backpacking in the summer, I try to arrange it around a cold spring that I've discovered on past trips.  When I'm not, I have a large animal watering trough that I fill with water and add ice to.  This latter method suffers from a few issues... 

• I need to use a large amount of water from my well to fill the container that I plunge into.  This isn't always a good idea during these summer droughts that plague us every year. 
• After I fill the tub, there's a limited shelf life for how long the water can be safely used before it gets disgusting and I need to dump it and fill it again. 
• Even though the water right from the well is fairly cold.  I still need to acquire a large amount of ice to get it to the desired temperature... Especially if I'm using it a day or so after I've initially filled it.

This got me thinking about how to repurpose my hot tub so that I can use it as a "cold tub"... especially during the summer time.  There are several hundred gallons of water already being treated to keep it clean.  Even though I'm maintaining this all year round, we don't often use it during the summer time.  Initially I thought, that my hot tub manufacturer must have already thought about this and there's surely a product that I can just buy to complete the conversion.  Unfortunately, this is not the case, so I'm in the early stages of researching this project.  Anyone do something like this before?

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Hügelkultur in Pennsylvania

A few months ago, I mentioned how I've been dabbling with Hügelkultur.  I recently wrote a blog post discussing it and why it's well suited for gardeners here in South Eastern Pennsylvania.  Check it out:

Fermented Solutions

I spoke about some software dilemmas I've been dealing with last month.  The Shopify Pixel related one was resolved in a much cleaner way than I initially envisioned.  This was mostly because the project ended up growing much larger after digging deeper.  Shopify is planning on rolling out more checkout extensibility features later this year and it started to become clear that my Pixel issue would be better addressed if I started migrating my checkout to this now.  Even though I didn't want to take on this larger project at first, it ended up being the better long term solution.

Zapier still appears to have a bug blocking my project there, but I haven't had the time to dig deeper into this yet.  They actually have an AI debug tool and it correctly identifies what the problem is, but there doesn't appear to be any way to actually correct the issue given the pieces that Zapier provides.

I'll be in the Miami area next week and NYC two weeks after that.  If you're in either spot and want to meet up, let me know!

Happy Fermenting!

J

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