Month: March 2008

That was *fun*! Thanks to everybody who emailed & called me last week (after I posted about the great week we had) with your own wonderfulness story. It is such a kick to hear about all the nice things going on! Yay!

Tomorrow I’m going to post some crafty wonderfulness from my friend Amy, from North Mississippi…sooo neat…

On our way home from the mounds, we stopped in Tupelo and ate at Johnnie’s Drive-In (908 E. Main). It’s pretty famous as Elvis’ favorite place for hamburgers. Elvis’ house is not even 1/2 mile from Johnnie’s:

Johnnie’s is an old-style drive in where the servers walk out to your car as soon as they see you pull up – there’s no order board or button to push, or anything.

They serve two kinds of hamburgers – all-meat hamburgers, and doughburgers (meat and dough (flour/water)). We got doughburgers:

Corinth has slugburgers, Tupelo has doughburgers, and they exist in Cullman (Busy Bee), Decatur (C.F. Penn), and Moulton (NeSmith Hamburgers) too.

If you’re really into slugburgers, there’s the annual slugburger festival in Corinth, July 10-12 this year…

After we left the Jerry Brown Arts Festival last weekend, we drove over to the Natchez Trace and took pics at a couple of Indian mound sites. This first one is the Bear Creek mound. It’s about 8 feet high and 85 feet across the base:

The park service has a sign here that reads:
“The village site was occupied as early as 8000 BC by hunters who stayed only long enough to prepare their kill.”
…”until 1000AD, migratory people of this area practiced limited agriculture. The nearby fields and streams offered an abundance of nuts, fruits, game, and fish. These people shaped this mound and built a crude temple on its summit to house their sacred images.”

Further down the Trace are the Pharr mounds. They were built between 1 and 200 AD/CE, and are on 85 acres, ranging in height from 2-18 feet high. This is mound A – it is seven feet high, and when it was excavated, archaeologists found a large grave underneath with three cremations:

On the left side of this pic, you can see mound b (18 feet high), c (18 feet high), and d (12 feet high), and way back in the middle is mound e (8 feet high):

Mound D is where archaeologists found copper spools and a few bone fragments, as well as a sandstone slab used as a crematory. Mound E is where they found projectile points, pottery shards, sheet mica, pipes, and ceramic vessels incised and stamped with distinctive designs.

The National Park Service has a nice website of several mounds in Mississippi, here.

Well, even though Av had a week of pharyngitis and I was feeling a little yucky/super-tired myself although I never came down with anything (thankfully Shug never got any of our ickiness), we had an amazing week.

You know, one of those weeks when everything goes really wonderfully and you get lots of good news and things just start clicking together? Things happen that make you smile all the time and think to yourself, mmm-hmmm, the world is great!?

Oh, it was one of those weeks, y’all.

I hope you are having that exact type of week.

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I do have a smidgen of happy news to share – it’s not the tippy-top of our happy news, but I signed a little contract/release this week for some of my pictures to be used in a movie that’s coming out next year! It’s called “The New Daughter” and Kevin Costner is playing the lead character. They bought rights to use some of the Indian mound pictures that I took a couple of years ago for one of the scenes. Nice!

Best of all, Shug is this close to crawling (he’s scooting a lot), which he is supposed to do anytime between 8-10 months, and he is the happiest and sweetest thing. Such a pleasure just to be around, all the time!

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I’m *so* behind on my emails right now since I’ve been feeling icky for several days but I’m going to catch up over the next two or three days. I would love to hear your good news. Got some wonderfulness to share? I would love to hear about it! (ginger AT deepfriedkudzu DOT com)

My friend Bonney’s daughter-in-law was on Martha several days ago – I saw it and thought “gosh that looks so familiar! I bet that is…” and it was!

Anna makes knit toys – they are the cutest ever! If you go to her blog, she has patterns (some are free!) and a little shop. Oh, if I could knit like that!!

Eight months old already!