- Renewed two shelter agreements with the Moore County School System.
- Got bit by a tick and started a two-week cycle of antibiotics.
- Started eating better and getting more exercise. More on this in a minute.
- Renewed strategic partnership with Duck River Southern Baptist Disaster Relief Organization. (Unfortunately for us, an obvious and convenient acronym has yet to be designated.)
- Got a story published in the Tullahoma News about Red Cross' need for more volunteers.
- Bought ads in four local papers repeating need for upcoming courses and advertising upcoming training classes. n the south will tell you that the common diet down here isn't exactly healthy. They'r
About the diet and exercise... Anybody who's lived here been introduced to the idea of the "meat and threes." (A diner where any dish is a meat and choice of three sides.) They're big on desserts. And a lot of foods down here are fried. Now it is all perfectly delicious. (Especially fried alligator tail. It's a delicious white meat - like turkey. Add some hot sauce and you got yourself a real tasty treat.) But it got to the point where I started noticing my face getting wider and my shorts getting tighter, and my gut starting to get in the way of tying my shoes. So a few weeks ago, I put myself on a regiment of fruit or salad for lunch. About three pounds of mixed fruit, melon, and berries at Krogers (local grocer) runs about eight dollars and lasts around three meals. Also drinking more milk and less soda pop.
I've also been hiking more often. My favorite spot is called Old Stone Fort.I've been hiking the rivers and the wood trails a lot. The route I've been taking most often is about three and a half miles. For those of you who don't know what it is, I've copied this from the TN State Parks Site:
The Old Stone Fort is a 2000 year-old American Indian ceremonial site. It consists of mounds and walls that combine with cliffs and rivers to form an enclosure measuring 1-1/4 miles around. The 50-acre hilltop enclosure mound site is believed to have served as a central ceremonial gathering place for some 500 years. It has been identified as, perhaps, the most spectacularly sited sacred area of its period in the United States and the largest and most complex hilltop enclosure in the south. Settlers tended to name such enclosures “forts.”
The spectacular setting occurs where two rivers drop off the plateau of the Highland Rim in Middle Tennessee and plunge to the level of the Central Basin of Tennessee. As the forks of the Duck River cut down from the plateau level they isolate a promontory between them before they join. This promontory was further set apart by the construction of long, wall-like mounds during the Woodland prehistoric period.
At the narrow neck of land between the two rivers there is a set of parallel mound walls oriented to within one degree of the summer solstice sunrise. It was typical of ancient societies to recognize this significant farthest north sunrise and to hold reenactments of creation myths at such times. Mound sites such as the 50-acre Old Stone Fort provided modified landscapes for ceremonies that may have represented in some way the culture’s concept of their place in the cosmos and a separation of the sacred and mundane or pure and impure. (End Copied Text.)
I, Brian Burke Toll of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania have made another magnificent discovery about Old Stone Fort and the origins and reasons for its importance.
