HRT - Hormone Replacement Therapy in Blawenburg, NJ

Tom Marshall, the seasoned songwriting partner of Phish‘s Trey Anastasio, has posed an exciting challenge via Osiris, the platform through which he hosts his Under The Scales podcast. In a post titled “Osiris Wordsmith Contest (aka Finish Tom’s Lyrics)“, Osiris lays out the details of the of the contest:

Tom wrote a verse of what might be a song someday. The problem is, he is stuck with a bad case of writer’s block. Please help Tom by contributing the next verse.

Rules—First, decide what this song might be about. What does it mean? Where should it go? Then, create a 4-line verse that makes sense after Tom’s first verse. Follow the same pattern Tom has established:

Use the same meter (word-rhythm: accents and syllables)

Use the same rhyme-scheme — that is, AABB…meaning line 1 rhymes with line 2, and line 3 rhymes with line 4.

Have fun!

You can check out the first verse of the contest’s unfinished lyrical prompt below:

Help me write a song (contest)! Need next verse. —- Finally dreaming forgetting the day I stepped off the edge, and floated away soaring through cloud-laden memories again where is she hiding, my dream-woven friend? —-https://t.co/GPDTd3L81s

— Tom Marshall (@TomMarshall111) August 10, 2018

To enter your lyrics, email them over to [email protected]. Notes Osiris, there will be 3 winners selected, with each receiving a Phish LP signed by Tom with a special message included. The winners will be announced during the Curveball “Couch Reports” on Friday afternoon and Sunday afternoon. Subscribe to the Osiris YouTube channel for more information on the schedule for their Curveball Couch Reports during Phish’s Curveball festival. Curveball is set to take place next weekend, from Friday, August 17th through Sunday, August 19th, marking Phish’s 11th multi-day festival and their third festival in Watkins Glen, NY.

You can listen to Tom Marshall’s podcast, Under The Scales, by heading here.

Steve Mekler

With Independence Day just around the corner, small-town sentiment and white-picket-fence Americana bubble up in the national consciousness.

Parades, fireworks, watermelon, children running barefoot in the grass — these rites have continued uninterrupted from at least as far back as the childhoods of Winslow Homer and Mark Twain.

Nothing embodies the tradition of a childhood Fourth better than the concert band, that staple of recreational parks and seaside gazebos that reached the apex of its popularity probably 100 years ago.

The Blawenburg Band is the living embodiment of another era, a musical time machine to halcyon days before booming subwoofers rocked even the most remote neighborhoods. It was a time when members of a community relied not on records or radio, but on themselves and their neighbors for musical entertainment.

Jerry Rife has directed the Blawenburg since 1985.

“It’s a band of about 65 members,” he says, “a full concert band, with flute and clarinets and oboes and wooden instruments.”

The band was founded in Blawenburg, a section of Montgomery Township, in 1890. It is the oldest continuously performing community band in the state, and one of the oldest in the country.

A piece of living history, the band plays roughly 30 concerts a year, an all-occasions ensemble, with appearances at parades, church socials and community events. A number of the concerts are annual occurrences, some extending back more than a century.

Rife mentions a flier that surfaced recently advertising the band’s appearance at one of its current venues. The handbill dates from 1911.

The band will appear in Yardley, Pa., on Wednesday for its annual Fourth of July concert, which Rife describes as “pure, blatant Americana at its best.”

The indoor event will include such hits of yesteryear as the overture to Sigmund Romberg’s “The Student Prince,” the World War II song “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and a medley of patriotic standards by George M. Cohan. John Williams’ “Midway March” will be featured, along with a selection of Leroy Anderson’s popular encore pieces, “America the Beautiful,” and of course plenty of marches by the likes of Karl King, Henry Fillmore and John Phillip Sousa.

“And it will be air-conditioned,” Rife adds.

The Blawenburg plays its share of outdoor concerts — in fact, it is more the rule than the exception, with appearances at carnivals, train stations and gazebos — although the band does play indoors at a number of continuing care retirement communities and assisted living residences, bringing cheer to audiences that have limited mobility.

“The spirit and mission of the Blawenburg Band is to bring music to our community,” Rife says. “Our members and I feel these are the most important performances.”

Rife is excited about the band’s Fourth of July concert, and thinks the venue couldn’t be any more appropriate.

The Yardley Community Centre has been a meeting place for area residents since 1851. Once used as a private school (tuition was 35 cents a week), it also served as a center for “The Sons of Temperance” and one of the country’s first Odd Fellows lodges. In 1878, the center was expanded to accommodate church services, fire company suppers and theatre productions.

“The hall will be fully decked out in red, white and blue,” Rife says. “You will think you walked off Main Street and right into a concert in Yardley in 1922. This music is from the golden age of bands, a time when communities relied on live band concerts as their primary entertainment.

“The Blawenburg Band perfectly recreates this feeling of nostalgia. It recaptures a time long past. It transports an audience back to its roots. This truly is the best way to experience the holiday of independence, with a parade, barbecue, fireworks, and a stirring band that guarantees to have you marching in your seats.”

The band has a full roster of summer concerts, including three appearances at the Hopewell Train Station, on July 9, July 23 and Aug. 6.

"It's a real hoot," Rife says of the popular concerts. "The train blows through during a number. It's just pure Americana." Further concerts take the band to the Hunterdon County Library on July 25, Pennswood Village in Newtown on July 30, Rosehill Assisted Living in Robbinsville on Sept. 9, Hunterdon Care Center in Flemington on Sept. 23 and Stonebridge at Montgomery in Skillman on Oct. 7.

The Harvest Home festival at Griggstown Reformed Church (Aug. 18) is an annual tradition.

“It’s right on the canal,” Rife says. “It’s a huge carnival, with lots of home-baked food, corn on the cob, shortcake … It’s a really fine concert.”

While most of the band’s appearances are free of charge, there will be an admission fee for the Fourth of July and Harvest Home appearances, to benefit the host venues.

The Blawenburg Band is a wholly volunteer ensemble, made up of musicians from all walks of life — scientists, lawyers, homemakers, computer specialists and active retirees. Players range in experience from dedicated amateurs, who discovered a love for music as schoolchildren, to those who have had years of training and professional opportunities. Musicians in their teens play cheek by jowl with colleagues in their retirement years.

Says Rife, with pride, “The Blawenburg Band is part of the fabric of central New Jersey, and has been so for well over a century.

"The kind of stuff that we play is golden age concert band music — a lot of transcriptions, opera overtures, some solos, Herbert L. Clarke, Arthur Pryor, a ton of Sousa marches. A lot of small, short, accessible pieces that are fun to listen to." Rife is on the faculty of Rider University, where he has been chairman of music in the fine arts department since 1984.

In addition to directing the Blawenburg Band, he is an active performer himself, playing clarinet with his jazz ensemble, The Rhythm Kings, for the past 25 years. He remarks dolefully (as if anything about Rife is doleful) that since the economy has taken a downturn, the Kings play “only” about 150 concerts a year.

The Blawenburg Band rehearses nearly every Monday evening, year-round, mostly at the Princeton Junior High School on Fackler Road.

More information on the band may be obtained by contacting Rife, at (609) 882-4148 or [email protected], or the ensemble's vice president and booking manager, Sharif Sazzad, at (609) 475-2831 or [email protected].

For a full roster of the band's summer activities, visit its website, princetonol.com/groups/blawenburgband.

Blawenburg Band Independence Day Concert

When

: 4 p.m. Wednesday

Where

: Yardley Community Centre, 64 S. Main St., Yardley, Pa.

Admission

: $15; (215) 493-5014

John Figlar/For The Star-Ledger

MONTGOMERY -- Clement Fiori didn’t start out as an environmentalist, he thought of his work as more of an “art project.”

“I like the ability to be outside doing things with the landscape and seeing it really shape up,” the Montgomery resident said. “It’s almost like an art project for me.”

The 66-year-old photographer said he started on his path to preservation while riding his bike and capturing New Jersey’s eroding landscape.

“The pictures I think are lovely in a certain way,” he said, pointing to black-and-white photos of tree-baren land. “But they also showed how the landscape was changing and I felt I had to do something.”

Fiori began going to planning meetings and took an interest in a housing project that would have paved over 50 acres behind his home. He rallied his neighbors.

“I suggested purchasing the 50-acre park and donating it to the town where everyone could enjoy it,” he said, adding that within a week the developer donated Hobler Park to the township.

That was in 1984. Fiori, who lives in the Blawenburg section of Montgomery with his wife Joanna, has been protecting the land ever since. Last month, Fiori won the Governor’s Environmental Excellence award, which is given to volunteers who significantly impact their communities through environmental protection.

A retired Princeton University Press photographer, Fiori has spent 35 years planting and protecting open space throughout Montgomery. “People look and see a field and think it’s just a field, but when you get down there you see a real diversity of species and plant life,” he said.

Fiori, who has two grown sons, spends several weekends a year making sure that others have a chance to “get down there” by leading volunteers in planting native species and tracking the different kinds of plant and wildlife that live in the spaces he’s helped preserve.

“It’s another way to get people out to appreciate what’s there to see what we’ve set aside with taxpayer money,” he said, adding that aside from lightening the work load, it ensures the work will continue.

“By making the land accessible to the public you create more advocates for open space since they can be on it,” he said.

Montgomery Mayor Louise Wilson said the township owes its strong open space program to Fiori’s efforts and noted that his efforts have inspired others.

“He’s perhaps the finest example in contemporary times of someone putting their heart, soul and mind into perserving what he loves about the town and helping others recognize and appreciate those things too,” she said last week. “He serves as an example that people who are able to and choose to volunteer really do have the ability to shape a community in profound ways that really do last.”

Between his role as chairman of the Montgomery Open Space Committee, adviser to the board of trustees of the Montgomery Friends of Open Space and trustee of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, the Princeton Artists Alliance member said he tries to find time to exhibit his artwork at least once a year.

The majority of his work, including “The Vanishing New Jersey Landscape,“ - a book he published in 1994 - depicts photographs of the very landscapes he’s trying to protect as well as a series of sculptures carved from his collection of tree stumps.

Though you won’t find the Governor’s award displayed on his coffee table or resting on a mantle near his framed nature prints, Fiori said he will use it to get projects moving.

“When I bring proposals to people who need to make decisions about things, it lets them know that I’m not just coming off the street telling them what to do,” he said. “That (the award) makes things a little easier.”

He hopes it will come in handy with his current project, the 350-acre Cherry Brook Preserve. Fiori wants the township to turn 90 of those acres into hiking trails.

Fiori said that he understands the need for development, but is concerned with safeguarding the farming culture of the township. “We have to balance what we develop with what we preserve because if we don’t it won’t be worth living here anymore,” he said.

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Princeton, NJ -- My last story for TAPinto Princeton was about my Mama's 91st birthday bash and my preparations for it. But the more I wrote about the party, the more I realized that a better subject was my mother herself. So here’s her amazing story, and it’s got

food angles all through it.

Valerie Hartshorne, born 1931, was never much of a cook in her early life. She got married to my dad, Nathaniel Hartshorne, when she was 21 and immediately got pregnant. They lived in a tiny basement apartment in Brooklyn Heights and soon after my older sister Anne (Brownie) was born, then came me and then my brother, Nathaniel (Max). She didn’t have a stovetop to cook on, so she used a Coleman stove, the camping kind. I was too young to have witnessed her food, and it was the late 1950s so I’m sure it wasn’t remarkable, just her effort to cook was.

My parents moved from Brooklyn Heights to Blawenburg in 1960. My father got a job editing at ETS so he could continue his writing and acting at McCarter Theater and other community stages. Mom soon had her fourth child, Caroline (Moo). Like many housewives of this era, Mom learned to cook from Julia Child. She watched The French Chef religiously and The Joy of Cooking was permanently propped open near the stove burner. For my 12th birthday, we -- I say we because I shared a birthday with my father -- had a first course of escargot, followed by chicken Kiev. I still remember the chicken Kiev, that large pot of hot oil on the stove, mom slowly lowering in balls of skinless chicken breasts filled with garlic herb butter and then rolled in breadcrumbs.

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The taste of the garlic herb butter oooozing out of that tender crusty chicken breast is hard to forget, and of course more garlic butter with the escargot. I thought it was so cool how you ate out of the snail’s empty shell. Mom was always exposing us to unusual foods. On one occasion, maybe just a weekend, I remember she said we were having a recipe she got from Julia for braised Sweetbreads (thymus gland) with a vegetable cream sauce. I can still taste the soft succulent texture of the sweetbread. Another time we had Cerveaux de veau (calves’ brains) blanched and served with butter, capers, and parsley. I do remember them tasting just as good as the sweetbreads, just not a great name. Christmas morning there were steak and kidney pies, and frog’s legs for another birthday. The Trenton Times wrote a story in 1968 about mom and how she prepared “educating meals” for her family of six.

In 1970, when I was a freshman in high school, mom opened up Soupe du Jour in Hopewell. Her friend “Frad” Young had been over for dinner and after a few drinks they got excited about a restaurant idea: a place that

would serve just soup, bread, and cheese. They rented a part of a clothing store in Hopewell called the Tomato Factory, and they set up tables in the back along the wall. Later they moved the restaurant to the center of town, where Nomad Pizza now lives. There was no real kitchen there, so Mom would make the soups in our kitchen, haul them down the driveway to her yellow VW hatchback, with our rooster, Thornton, pecking at her ankles, and she would set up the stock pots of soups at the restaurant on hot plates.

She made her own French bread. I remember getting home from high school with the smell of bread baking in the oven. She also made lemon squares, toffee nut squares, and chocolate mint brownies from scratch.

I must add here that in addition to cooking, shopping, and working at the restaurant from 9 to 3, Monday through Friday, mom would serve a delicious hot meal to all six of us every night. I can only remember going out to eat one night when my mom burned the chicken dinner. It was so exciting for me to be sitting at PJ’s Pancake house (yes it was there back then) eating pancakes for dinner.

At Soupe du Jour, the guests would sit down and someone, maybe me, would bring you a glass of iced tea, and you would then order your soup. (There were two choices). Your soup would come in a bright colored terrine placed in the middle of the table, French bread and cheese would come next on a tiny cutting board, and then mom or Frad would bring you a small glass of sherry. It was encouraged to order a refill on soup. After lunch was cleared there was a fruit stick (strawberries, grapes, and melon skewered), and an assortment of homemade dessert squares. The charge in 1971 was $3.50. If you left a tip, either Frad or mom would come running out to your car waving the cash to return it. The sherry was frowned upon by the health department -- they explained to mom you couldn’t sell sherry. So mom and Frad’s answer was to spray sherry from a cleaned-out plant sprayer into your bowl of soup instead.

Soupe du Jour was a huge success. In the mid-1970s Craig Claiborne, a big food name at the time, wrote a story about the restaurant in the food column of the New York Times. As a result, hundreds of new customers arrived.

Mom’s p

artner, Frad, had a beautiful doll house in the center of the restaurant and inside were miniature chairs and cupboards filled with bowls and tiny spoons, each room’s walls decorated with real wallpaper. Soupe du Jour was a meeting spot where friends would see friends and hover over each other's tables to catch up. (In the photo to the left, the people in front of the doll house are Martha Young, Frad Young, Cay Mohrman, and my mom, on the right.)

My mother was quiet about her achievements. Preparing for this article, I looked through her “Soupe du Jour” book, friends' letters with recipes, and even a fan mail letter from one woman who writes “I have just finished reading The Entrepreneurial Woman, by Sandra Winston. You must know you are mentioned in the book. This has certainly been just the book I needed. You have developed the type of business I have had in mind. I guess I have always been told it must be a full time 12 hour-a-day job. I too, have family obligations I don’t want to ignore. “

The letter writer ends with more questions and then she says, “It has given me a great lift to know you are doing this.” That letter was written in the early 1970s by a woman named Joyce Hersberger, from Novi, Michigan. I’m just seeing it for the first time, and it occurs to me how original my mom was in raising four children, feeding them time-consuming great food, and starting a restaurant back when women still cooked TV dinners and heated up frozen vegetables, and when raising your kids was your full-time job.

Things at the restaurant got so busy that they had to hire a manager. Patty Phillips helped make soup and she eventually bought the place for pennies in the late 1970s. Patty continued running Soupe du Jour for at least 20 years. The menu and concept always remained the same, just the price went up. That was my mother’s “goodwill” and brand working. In the end mom had started serving dinners once a week at “Soupe” as we called it and so she was able to transition easily into catering, a company she named Hartshorne Catering. She had a reputation and a following, so I went from working as a waitress in the restaurant to running dinner parties and weddings with my mother.

My mom ran Hartshorne Catering for about eight years and stopped in her mid-60s. When I started the Blawenburg Market in 2001, mom and her friend Yolanda McPhee would come over every Wednesday and prepare delicious soups from her Soupe du Jour years. Here’s one of her easiest and most popular soups.

Spinach and Leek.

4-6 small packages of frozen spinach, defrost overnight. Squeeze the spinach dry and set aside. (Do this part thoroughly.)

Cut up two leeks (tips and dark leaves off) and put in a blender. Chop and add spinach and ½ a large package of cream cheese. Blend until smooth.

Add chicken stock to the consistency of soup. It is a gorgeous bright green color. Serve hot or cold with a garnish of sliced mushroom or a few chunks of ham.

Another catering secret that mom discovered was always a fun one to serve at parties. We called it fake crab dip:

Grate five carrots, put it in a bowl and add ¾ cup of mayo and ¾ cup of Parmesan cheese. Mix it together and put it in a pie dish.

Bake at 350 until bubbly.

For the grated carrots you can substitute chopped artichoke hearts.

Serve it with tortilla chips.

My mom’s life is winding down now at 91. She has nine grandchildren and two great grandchildren. She has

two daughters very close by and one living with her. Her son lives in western Massachusetts and visits often. Mom lost my dad in 2018 but still lives pretty happily in Blawenburg, in the house she raised us in.

She has had a fulltime aide named Lisa for the last three years who is a wonderful companion. And – wouldn’t you know – Lisa also happens to be an excellent cook.

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The Stony Brook Regional Sewerage Authority (SBRSA) in Princeton, NJ provides treatment and disposal services for wastewater residuals. Their River Road Wastewater Treatment Plant was constructed in 1976 and began taking flow in 1978. The plant receives flow from Princeton Borough and Township, South Brunswick Township, and West Windsor Township.

The Stony Brook Regional Sewerage Authority (SBRSA) in Princeton, NJ provides treatment and disposal services for wastewater residuals. Their River Road Wastewater Treatment Plant was constructed in 1976 and began taking flow in 1978. The plant receives flow from Princeton Borough and Township, South Brunswick Township, and West Windsor Township.

Sludge is generated as part of the wastewater treatment process. The sludge is de-watered and then incinerated in one or two multiple hearth incinerators. The sewage sludge incineration (SSI) process is continuous and averages approximately 6.0 wet tons per hour, operating 6 days per week and 52 weeks per year.

To control odors and carbon monoxide (CO) at SBRSA, the exhaust from the incinerator was originally conveyed to a direct fired afterburner system, before passing through a wet venturi scrubber for removal of coarse particles. The Authority recognized that approximately 50 percent of the natural gas used in the incineration process was consumed by the direct fired afterburner. This became the focus of the Authority’s initiative to reduce operating costs.

SBRSA consulted Chavond-Barry Engineering (CBE) in Blawenburg, NJ, a local engineering firm with years of experience on multiple hearth incinerators and Sewage Sludge Incineration. After extensive review of the process, CBE recommended a Regenerative Thermal Oxidizer (RTO) to obtain the greatest reduction in operating costs.

CBE recommended Dürr Systems of Plymouth, Michigan, based on their successes at similar facilities in Wayne, NJ and Fitchburg, MA. High thermal efficiency, high destruction efficiency and a proven track record were some of the reasons used to formulate CBE’s equipment and supplier recommendation.

In addition to Durr’s experience in the industry, CBE specified Dürr’s Ecopure RL RTO system for the added benefit of the single rotary valve that allows for high destruction efficiency, low system maintenance as well as the compact footprint offered by the skid-mounted design.

The skid mounting offers the advantages of pre-piping and wiring of the RTO to an integral control room thus saving cost and time during installation. A final consideration was the advantage of an online bakeout feature that allows the reduction of particulate on the heat recovery beds while continuing to operate at full production volume.

The project included the addition of a Wet Electrostatic Precipitator (WESP) for a total system install cost of $4.9 million. Since going online with the Durr RL RTO, SBRSA has realized an average monthly savings in natural gas usage of 49 percent that equates to over $2,500,000 thus far in energy cost savings. The return on investment for the entire project stands at just under 3.5 years.

“The reduction in incineration operating costs has been a significant factor in the Authority’s ability to keep operating costs and annual budgets stable during a time when member municipalities are under significant economic stress” states Courtney Bixby, Assistant Manager of Engineering at the Plant. “Keeping in line with the Authority’s vision, our carbon footprint has been reduced considerably as well as our impact on the environment.”

RTO System Details

Risk was greatly reduced by employing an RTO technology that was previously proven in difficult situations where odor and CO destruction were critical project objectives. The Ecopure design features a single rotary diverter valve, twelve heat recovery chambers enclosed in a single tower, and a pre-piped, pre-wired, skid-mounted package. The single rotary valve is resistant to particulate and condensables while few moving parts reduce maintenance and improve system uptime.

The RL features a continuous purge which makes it particularly well-suited for any performance emission reduction application. An RTO without a purge feature will “puff” untreated emissions which can be detected locally. Rotary valve RTO’s eliminate the “puffing” which occurs during valve switching, a common problem with conventional regenerative thermal oxidizers.

“The Durr RL has been very well received by the operators of the plant” states Mr. Bixby. “It has been dependable and easy to operate”

In Compliance with Revised EPA Emissions Standards

The emissions from sewage sludge incinerators are regulated in part by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), Section 129 of the Clean Air Act. These revised standards for both new and existing incinerators were published in 2011 and all operating sewage sludge incinerators are required to be in compliance with these standards by March 21, 2016.

“Potentially, as the upgrade bills accumulate, many sewage sludge incinerators may have to be in compliance with the considerably lower emission standards for new incinerators” suggests Mr. Louis T. Barry, P.E., president of CBE.

Along with the revised emission standards for existing incinerators this regulation also requires existing incinerators to meet the stricter emissions standards of new incinerators, should their accumulated system upgrades reach 50 percent of the initial install cost for the facility, adjusted to current dollars.

“The addition of the RTO and WESP has put us in a better position to meet those standards” claims Mr. Bixby.

About the Author

Greg Thompson is a marketing associate at Dürr Systems, Inc. in the Environmental and Energy Systems Group.