Cox Bros BBQ After Hours

Junction City After Hours

Thursday, September 17th at 5:30 pm

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"No TransHUB For You!" - KDOT Abandoned The Middle of the State

City of Abilene Kansas Did Not Make the Cut - But Not Out?

City of Abilene Responds to KDOT Announcement

 

The City of Abilene learned this morning that the Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) is moving forward with two finalists for additional due diligence concerning the development of a transload facility in the State of Kansas.

The City of Abilene and Dickinson County submitted a site that eventually became one of seven finalists in a process facilitated by KDOT to determine the most feasible sites for the development of such a facility. Over 100 sites were submitted by communities throughout Kansas.

The Abilene Site was, unfortunately, not among the two finalists identified for further due diligence at this time. KDOT has elected to move forward with further due diligence on sites submitted by Garden City and Great Bend.

“The City of Abilene is disappointed with the announcement by the Kansas Department of Transportation,” says Mayor Dennis Weishaar. “Disappointment, however, is not the same as loss. The City hopes to continue the conversation about developing the site into a successful transload facility.”

KDOT officials stated that additional due diligence was needed to ensure that the remaining two finalists were viable for development.

The primary issue for the Abilene Site was its location within the 100­year floodplain. “KDOT informed the City that they were very interested in the Abilene Site, but that there were several questions about the floodplain and how it could specifically be mitigated,” says City Manager David Dillner. “The City and County is still very interested in moving forward on a trajectory that allows a transload facility to be developed near Abilene, although we have some work to do in order to more fully understand the site and its constraints.”

The Abilene Site has several key advantages, such as access to Interstate 70 and the potential for access to both BNSF and Union Pacific railroads, that make it very attractive for potential development opportunities in the freight industry. 

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5 Star Arts Festival in Downtown Abilene

5 Star Arts Festival in Downtown Abilene

Artists of all mediums still have time to apply to the first 5 Star Arts Festival to be held in historic downtown Abilene on September 25- 27, 2015. Booth space is only $50 per booth. Artists will be set up in tents in downtown Abilene as well as located inside local Abilene Businesses.

All aspiring and emerging Artists are encouraged to apply. This is a great opportunity to showcase and sell your art to visitors attending this special event.

The 5 Star Arts Festival is hosting a full weekend of arts, music and food. Activities are planned for every age and taste.

The event kicks off Friday Sept. 25 at 5 p.m. with live music on the main stage located at Buckeye & 2nd Street. Food vendors will be set up offering a variety of choices. Art displays and food vendors will open at 10 a.m. on Saturday. Live music will begin at noon on Saturday with a variety of musicians performing all day.

The 2nd Annual "Taste of Abilene" will be held in the historic Depot beginning at 6 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26. Tickets are available at the CVB office for $20. Local restaurants will be presenting "tastes" of their menu and specialty foods.

Artist applications are available by contacting the Abilene Convention and Visitors Bureau at 785-263-2231 or e-mailing 5starartsfest@gmail.com. Complete event details will be available on the Abilene Kansas App which can be downloaded on both android and iPhone platforms.

Special thanks to the Community Foundation of Dickinson County for their generous support. Additional sponsors include Eagle Communications and Rawhide Portable Corral as well as several other local businesses and individuals.

The mission of the 5 Star Arts Festival is to celebrate the arts with a 5-star experience bringing together a community of artists and audiences to educate and cultivate the development and understanding of diverse art forms.

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A Traditional Farm Life - Stove Hot Cocoa

A Traditional Farm Life

By Shasta Hamilton 

Greetings from Enterprise, dear friends!   Partially hidden and around the corner, I am listening quietly as exotic place names waft through the air to my chair.

“Where is Bangladesh?” one asks.  Necks crane, eyes squint, looking closely at the new world map on the wall.  One after another, places our children have heard about are named, and the map is searched until the location is found.

It’s the first day of school at the Hamilton’s.  Our “scholars” are getting acquainted with two new wall maps—one of the United States and the other of the world.

Our Geography lessons will be informal, but hopefully interesting to the students, as they find the places they read about.  The same friend that gave us the maps also generously furnished an outdated Junior High Geography textbook for our perusal.

We can’t afford to take our family of eight on a trip around the world right now, so the world must be opened to our children through the pages of a book.

Our children are voracious readers, so the Geography textbook is already in high demand.  (Perhaps a lesson on sharing should come first?) 

Through this book’s pages our children are “meeting” children from China, Russia, Mexico, etc.  Full color pictures of a day in these featured children’s lives leap up from the page.  Perhaps surprisingly to our youngsters, these children in far-flung countries don’t look too much different than folks we see around town every day.

It’s a lesson worth learning.

How can we understand our own small world without an understanding of the big picture?

For our family, the “big picture” is formed by family discussion and directed study.  What better place to start than with a book?

It takes a lot of “food” to feed this family of bookworms.  If we don’t have what we need in our own family library, we head to a public library.  Simply put, books are an integral part of our lives.

You can imagine our surprise when we heard recently that the books are disappearing from the public schools around us.  It is our understanding the good old-fashioned, plunk-down-in-front-of-you textbooks are being rapidly being replaced with electronic versions on personal student computers.  Not being particularly tech savvy ourselves—by design—this is hard for us to digest.

We just love books, particularly the old ones.  Reading an old book is a full sensory experience—the smell of yellowed paper, the crackle of the page turning, stories read drawing you so near to a forgotten time you can almost taste it . . .

Dear friends, I know the wonders of modern technology are seductive, but please don’t relegate the printed page to a musty, old, forgotten closet.  A book never runs low on battery, and is a suitable companion for all seasons. 

Please call me old-fashioned. . . I can’t imagine curling up in my favorite chair of an evening with a cup of hot cocoa, staring at a glowing screen for hours on end.  I’m getting a headache just thinking about it!

The extent to which you use modern technology is, of course, a personal choice—your choice. 

It is safe to say you won’t find me leading a charge against your favorite glowing screen, for I have quietly retreated to my favorite chair with a beloved, musty smelling, crackly sounding, dog-eared relic of literary history—an old book.

As summer turns to fall, cooler evening temperatures make a late night cup of hot cocoa while snuggled up with a good book sound tempting. 

I

f you’ve only had the kind of hot cocoa where you put powder in a mug and add hot water, you’ll be amazed by full-bodied, rich flavor of hot cocoa made on top of the stove.  It’s kind of like the difference between a glowing screen and a good, old-fashioned book.

Top of the Stove Hot Cocoa

1/2 cup sugar

1/4 cup Hershey’s Cocoa

Dash salt

1/3 cup hot water

4 cups milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1.  Mix sugar, cocoa and salt in saucepan; stir in water.

2.  Cook and stir over medium heat until mixture boils; boil and stir 2 minutes.

3.  Stir in milk and heat.  DO NOT BOIL.

4.  Remove from heat; add vanilla.

Yield:  6 servings.

Copyright © 2015 by Shasta Hamilton

Shasta is a fifth generation rural Kansan now residing in Enterprise, Kansas.  She and her husband own and operate The Buggy Stop Home-Style Kitchen with their six home-schooled children.  You can reach The Buggy Stop by calling (785) 200-6385 or visit them on the web at www.thebuggystoprestaurant.com.

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A Traditional Farm Life - Buttercream Frosting

A Traditional Farm Life

By Shasta Hamilton

Greetings from Enterprise, dear friends!   This morning it was downright chilly outside.  Is this really August in Kansas?  Now, don’t get me wrong.  We are definitely NOT complaining.

The change in the air also brings to mind crisp, clean notebooks, the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil, and the promise a new box of crayons brings.  Our children are eagerly (maybe not!) awaiting the beginning of their school year next week. 

Everything was ready to start this week, but 20 dozen cupcakes have a way pushing everything else aside.  However, by the time you read this, those newly sharpened pencils will be put to work.

Even though no grade will be given, baking and frosting 20 dozen cupcakes is an educational experience.

Math skills have been sharpened by the doubling of recipes and multiplying the number of times said recipe needs to be doubled in order to reach the total number needed.  Planning was done in advance in order to buy all the supplies needed at one time for the whole project.

An A+ cupcake does not just “happen,” we’re discovering.  In fact, there has been quite a learning curve.

Until we moved here last fall, I had always used an electric oven.  In this house I now have a natural gas range.  As we tested different cupcake recipes here at home the differences in baking soon became painfully obvious.

As the heat source now comes solely from the bottom of the oven, using two racks yielded burned bottoms on the bottom rack and underdone cupcakes on the top rack on our first attempt.  (I was afraid to shift racks half way through for fear the cupcakes would deflate and “fall.”)  We’ve now found that oven “sweet spot,” but it means only baking on one oven rack at a time.

Our first batch of chocolate cupcakes were overdone and dry.  I’m now taking the cupcakes out just a bit before my intuition tells me to--when the top is just a bit sticky but the center is done.

So far, so good.

Now, we turn to the task of frosting 20 dozen cupcakes.  As we are of the opinion that butter makes everything better, a buttercream frosting is our first choice for cupcakes.  Bakery frosting recipes generally use either part or all shortening.

Why, you might ask?

Because butter melts.

A frosting made with shortening, even in part, has the ability to better hold its shape in the face of higher temperatures.  I’m no professional cake decorator, but I can imagine that if I were to spend all that time decorating a cake, I would NOT want to see it melting in front of me on a hot August afternoon.

That said, we tried a compromise.  It was half butter, half shortening.  It tasted just like—you guessed it--bakery frosting.  It was OK, but it just didn’t have the extra “umph” in the flavor department that only butter can give. 

All things considered, we decided to go for flavor and hope for a cool August day.  Strangely enough, we might just get it!

Buggy Stop Buttercream Frosting

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, room temperature

3-3/4 cups powdered sugar, sifted

3 to 4 tablespoons milk

1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

Place butter in a large mixing bowl.  Beat with an electric mixer until fluffy, about 30 seconds.  Add powdered sugar, 3 tablespoons milk, vanilla, and almond extract.  Blend on low speed until sugar is incorporated, about 1 minute.  Scrape down sides of bowl.  Beat on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 1 minute more.  Blend in up to 1 tablespoon more milk if the frosting seems too stiff.

Yield:  31/2 cups frosting, enough for a 2-layer cake or about 18 cupcakes.

Copyright © 2015 by Shasta Hamilton

Shasta is a fifth generation rural Kansan now residing in Enterprise, Kansas.  She and her husband own and operate The Buggy Stop Home-Style Kitchen with their six home-schooled children.  You can reach The Buggy Stop by calling (785) 200-6385 or visit them on the web at www.thebuggystoprestaurant.com.

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Constitution Day - Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum

Constitution Day programs will be held again this year at the Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home in partnership with the Eisenhower Foundation. The interactive event, designed for 4th and 5th grade students, will be offered during the week of Sept. 14-18. Kansas recognizes the week containing Sept. 17, the date the U.S. Constitution was signed, as Celebrate Freedom Week.

The program helps students honor and celebrate the privileges and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship, as well as commemorate the signing of the Constitution. Space is still available for schools to participate. Reservations from teachers should be made by Sept. 3 by calling 785-263-6754 or emailing Pam.Sanfilippo@nara.gov.

The event will include four 30-minute participatory student activities. Groups of 20-25 students will rotate through the four stations:

Activity 1: "Holding History" - Students will examine copies of letters kids wrote to President Eisenhower. Discussion will include topics of that period in history and how citizens can interact with the Executive Branch of government.

Activity 2: "Dear Mr. President" - Following a discussion of several current topics, students will write their own letter to President Obama.

Activity 3: "The U.S. Flag" - Students will look at flag artifacts and hear about the changes to our flag under President Eisenhower when Alaska and Hawaii were added as states.

Activity 4: "Presidential Pics" - In the Presidential Gallery of the Museum, students will create a collage on their school iPad app, Pic Collage. (If the school does not have iPads available for their visit, a gallery scavenger hunt will be substituted

 The Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home, a nonpartisan federal institution, is part of the Presidential Libraries network operated by the National Archives and Records Administration. Presidential Libraries promote understanding of the presidency and the American experience. We preserve and provide access to historical materials, support research, and create interactive programs and exhibits that educate and inspire.

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CCCC Hybrid Associate Degree in Business

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