The Rear View Mirror

Check out the new pictures from our visit here.

Space museum founder charged with theft - Space News - MSNBC.com

Based on Russ’s recommendation, we are at the Cosmosphere, a space exploration museum. It has the largest collection of Russian and American artifacts, including the actual Apollo 13 capsule.

I’m sorry for those who have no interest in barbecue, but the pastor’s wife had barbecued brisket for supper with potato salad and coleslaw. It was fantastic. I had a sandwich for supper, and then for desert after the service she had peach cobbler, which was great as well, but I did finish off the night with some more brisket.

She was kind enough to give me the recipe, so here it is if your interested in trying it. She had KC Masterpiece sauce with it.

6lb. brisket, sprinkle with 3 T. liquid smoke, garlic powder, onion salt and celery salt. Allow to stand overnight. Cover with foil. Next morning sprinkle with pepper and worcestershire sauce. Cover and bake 5 hours at 275°. Drain off most of the grease then uncover and bake one hour with barbecue sauce.

Friday afternoon and some of today, we were able to spend at the Kansas City Country Club Plaza. It’s a very nice outdoor shopping and eating area. We couldn’t afford to buy anything, but it was nice just to get out and walk around. We did eat there, though. For lunch today I ate. . . you guessed it. . . BBQ. There is a KC Masterpiece restaurant in the Plaza, so Ben, Jon, and I went there to eat. Jon ordered “Dinosaur Bones,” which are pretty close to that. They are beef ribs from a full grown cow, so they really are gigantic. Check out the gallery to see Jon chowing down. I had the spare ribs, so Jon and I swapped some meat. Mine were incredibly tender. I really wouldn’t have needed teeth even. The sauce was very good. It is the one you can buy in stores. It’s a pretty thick sweet sauce, because it’s molasses base.

Yesterday when we were down there we came across a Segway scooter store, so we stopped in to take a look. In 1999, Dean Kamen designed this scooter, which used a gyroscope (actually the one identical to that in a Boeing 747) to keep the scooter upright and allow for a compact two wheel design. The basic principle is this, you lean forward on the balls of your feet. This make the scooter off balance, and if nothing else were to happen you would fall flat on your face. However, the gyroscope senses this balance problem and moves the wheels forward, so that the base of the scooter stays under the load. The further you lean forward, the more off balance and the faster the scooter has to go in order to stay under your center of gravity.

The last portion of this gallery is a Van’s RV-9A plane that a family we stayed with owned. This was actually a kit plane, so they built it themselves, and therefore it fell into the class of an experimental airplane. However, the cockpit was fairly sophisticated and had integrated GPS with autopilot, so you could set your GPS waypoint and turn on the autopilot.

Well, enough reading. Click here to see the pictures.

We are back at the church’s school for chapel this morning and heard an
update. When she came back Wednesday night for church, she already
began asking for discipleship literature. The church is very excited to
see her so eager for growth.

Yesterday we were able to kill some time up at Ha Ha Tonka State Park. Around the turn of the 20th century a mansion was built on the top of a bluff, looking down over the water below. Fire destroyed the mansion, but the solid rock walls stand to this day. See the pictures here.

Last Sunday morning our hosts told us out about a lady who had been visiting the church for several weeks. Although she had grown up in a “Christian” home, she had never truly accepted Christ as her Savior. She and her husband had been uninvolved in any church for some time until a family invited them to visit the church we were at. They began to attend fairly regularly. On Easter Sunday after our drama she came forward for salvation. Please pray that the Lord will use her testimony to reach her husband.

1 Peter 3:1-2 (ESV)
Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives–when they see your respectful and pure conduct.

I really didn’t intend this blog to become a tour of BBQ in the central
states, but when a guy comes up to you after the service and the first
thing he asks is if your planning on stopping somewhere for BBQ, you
better take his advice. He suggested two: Arthur Bryant’s and
Masterpiece (as in the sauce). I ran the names by two friends of mine,
who are far more experienced with BBQ, and both said Arthur Bryant’s
would not be disappointing. We had some downtime before a service, so I
took the van over to Bryant’s. This was the original location since
Arthur took control of the restaurant from his brother. I don’t think
much has changed since the 1930s. Arthur Bryant himself called it a
“grease house.” The atmosphere is a bit like the Beacon in that they
yell at you, not as caustic, though, but then again, you don’t go to
Bryant’s for the customer service. I ordered a pork sandwich, which is
sliced pork. The bread looked like regular white bread, but the amount
of meat they put on it is somewhat staggering. I’m sure it was at least
four inches thick. The sauce was very good, a little bit spicy.

Well, chains are sort of looked down on by the real barbecue connoisseurs, but I did find the wood pile, and besides it is like 50 yards from the hotel. The ribs have great flavor, but I better put the phone down or I’ll get sauce all over it.

(I do realize this is a crummy picture, but that’s what you get with cell phone cameras.)

This town’s name seemed really familiar to me, so I asked the pastor we were with if it had some historical significance. He said that it was the end of the Chisholm Trail. The cowboys would drive the cattle herds here and then load them up on rail cars headed for Chicago. See Token Knowledge about the stock yards. The Chisholm Trail fell into disuse as inexpensive barbed-wire closed in the cattle and the railroad opened up the west.

You can see the new gallery here.

Wamego, KS is about 10 miles off the interstate, but is home to the OZ Museum. We watched a little bit of the film there, and I think my favorite line is, “What would you do with a brain if you had one?”

Token Knowledge: The original actor casted to play the Tin Man had to be rushed to the hospital after a few days of shooting because the aluminum dust they put in the make-up had coated the insides of his lungs. When he tried to breath, none of the oxygen could get to the blood. He spent a long time recouperating. He was replaced and so was the make-up. They switched to an aluminum paste in the make-up.

I’m by no means a great judge of a barbecue place, but this one looked more along the lines of a mom and pop. What really clenched my decision to go was the pile of wood out back, something a mentor of mine has said to watch for. I just had the pulled pork sandwich, but it really was good. The sauce was pretty sweet and even a hair spicy. It was the best barbecue since leaving Greenville. Quite frankly, though, it wasn’t hard to beat the alternative, which was Taco Bell.

On our way out of Nebraska, we saw a billboard advertising a Family Fun
Center that had lazertag. It was Friday, our day off, so we were able
to stop and play. Unfortunately, Sarah wasn’t feeling well, so just the
five of us played. It was the first time I had played lazertag on an
actual course. When we were young, our uncle got us a set of vests and
guns that we played with, which was really fun to run around the house
with. We were all pretty tired after running around in the room for
fifteen minutes, especially since it was pretty hot in there.

It did almost seem that fast. We were there for about two days, saw two cities and 400 miles, and that was it. One of the church’s pastor was down at BJ for Bible Conference, and he allowed us to stay in his house as a team. That’s always a nice opportunity to catch up on correspondance, reading, or rest. We’re now in Kansas, and will be here about two weeks, so I’ll hopefully get some blogs up.

Certainly we’re not all perfect. I’m sure you could find grammatical errors in this blog. However, if you get frustrated by being docked for spelling in classes other than English, wait till you’re the CG guy at Fox, perhaps that expectation will help you avoid misspelling “soldier.”

Last Thursday night I had the opportunity to stay with a friend of mine from school, David Phillips, who graduated last semester. He works for Rockwell Collins, “a world-class provider of aviation electronic and communication solutions.” Just about everything that flies in the skies has some device built by them. David works in the government projects division, hence the title of this blog. I really did have to leave my camera cell phone with the security officer. At Rockwell Collins they design and manufacture GPS devices for the military as well as radio and satallite communication devices. David is currently working on a project called JTRS. It is a radio system designed to be modular, so that it can be reconfigured for any number of situations, allowing one box to talk air-air, air-ground, air-satellite, etc. on any number of frequencies. Don’t worry, this is all on their website, I’m not divulging national defense secrets. There are numerous labs that have pretty high security before you can get in. When they bring visitors in you have to sign in and out, and they push a red button, which activates a red rotating beacon light to warn the workers of a visitor in the room. It really was a fascinating tour, and very educational for me.

We hear that phrase often in Chapel and Sunday morning, but don’t often get to hear how the Lord answers the prayers. Jon and I stayed with a pastor and his wife, who are both BJ alumni. Last semester, they were going to have an early morning service and then breakfast afterwards. When she started working on breakfast, she bent down to get something out of a cabinet and her heart began to pound, she couldn’t catch her breath, and almost passed out. She convinced her husband to just take her home, so she could lie down in bed. Her husband continued with the second service and preached on what it meant to be a true saint and there were several Catholics in the service. The next day they took her to the doctor’s office and when the doctor heard what had happened he told them to go straight to the emergency room. When they got there they discovered that she had two blood clots in her leg, so they had to do surgery right away. Later, a friend of theirs told them that the morning her pain started, BJ had prayed for them in Sunday church on campus.

The new gallery is up and you can see it here.

(Click on image for full size.) I’m working on a new gallery of a farm we stayed at, but here’s a panorama of one wing of their hog house. He raises about 2,500 pigs at a time. They come to him at about 10lbs and leave at about 300lbs. The smell was an incredibly strong ammonia smell. The floor has slits in it and there is a holding tank that is as wide and long as the building and about eight feet high. Every year and a half they empty it and use it as fertilizer.