I really had a good time last evening and I just wanted to say thank you again for the thoughtful gifts. I just hope you weren't all bored to tears by the Doctor Who episode, which probably gave David Tennant the least screen time of any episode he did, and that I didn't oversell the episode as one of my all-time favorites. My only complaint is that I feel more than a bit wasted from not enough sleep this morning because I *had* to get up by 7:30 to watch both the German Formula 1 Grand Prix race and today's Tour de France stage in the Pyrenees; many yawns this morning.
But I wanted to follow up on a couple of things that came up in conversation. There are several brands of evaporative cooling cloth products (scarves, towels, head bands, hat and helmet liners), but the two leading brands seem to be Chill-Its (from a company called Ergodyne) and Frog Toggs, both of which are available from Amazon. Some customer reviews for each product do have some issues, but most reviewers seem to love the products (assuming that they are real customers and not shills). The beef rancher I was trying to think of is Simply Grazin, who actually raise certified organic pork, veal, and poultry in addition to beef (http://www.simplygrazin.com/about/). The 220 acre farm they lease is right on Rt. 206 and Opossum Rd. in Skillman, just south of the Montgomery Blooms nursery. They used to sell their products at the farm, but a couple of years ago opened a retail shop on Rt 518 in Blawenburg under the name Mallery's Grazin Meats (http://www.mallerysgrazinmeats.com/). Then they opened a second shop in the Knightsbridge Center in Hillsborough (that office/shop complex cattycorner from the Hillsborough Municipal Center and Library at South Branch Rd. and Beeckman Rd.) where they also operate Mallery's Eatery (http://eatery.mallerysgrazinmeats.com/), which serves breakfast and lunch daily. The news item I saw was apparently they they are now expanding to serve dinner one night a month with seating by reservation only--not too practical for a no-advanced-planning type like me. I first became aware of their beef when they were serving samples at a specialty foods festival that McCaffery's put on under a tent in the P'ton shopping center courtyard a couple of years ago, which Paul and Sara also went to. I've bought their meat at McCaffery's a couple of times since then--good, but not really exceptional, and pretty pricey. Maybe their retail meat shop might be a source for cooking suet (or pork fat to render into fresh lard), since they get all their cuts directly from the south Jersey organic meat processor/butcher they work with (Bringhurst's in Berlin)? Regarding Roku boxes for Ellen to stream video content from the Web to the TV, there are a couple of options depending on how high the HD needs to be (I'm not sure whether the TV is a 720p or 1080p). If the TV is only 720p, the most cost-effective model is the $50 Roku LT http://www.amazon.com/Roku-2450D-LT-Streaming-Player/dp/B008R7EVE4/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1373207796&sr=1-2&keywords=roku which is even purple instead of black. Or for $10 more, you can get the Roku HD, which adds an instant replay feature on the remote and but has only purple highlights on a mostly black box http://www.amazon.com/Roku-2500R-HD-Streaming-Player/dp/B007KEZMX4/ref=sr_1_4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1373207796&sr=1-4&keywords=roku If the TV is a 1080p screen, the same models will provide better-than-DVD quality, but to get full HD one would need to move up to the $80 Roku 2 XD http://www.amazon.com/Roku-XD-Streaming-Player-1080p/dp/B005CLPP8E/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1373207796&sr=1-3&keywords=roku If the TV doesn't have an available HDMI connector (I should have looked...) only the two lower cost, 720p models are relevant because they have RCA-type video and stereo audio connectors (the 2 XD has only HDMI). -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers/attachments/20130707/782dd166/attachment.html>
