Update: Have you received your T-shirt and would like to add it to our map? You can find the Our T-shirt World Map at this address: Hammock.com/tshirt.

This year, our annual tradition of giving friends a Hammock T-shirt is going global. For the past 16 years, we've shared an annual edition T-shirt with lots of people we work with throughout the year. They're often packaged in fun, creative ways. As we began to consider a new T-shirt (to go along with a new website and some new spin on our logo and graphics), we decided to make our T-shirt sharing a little more interactive.

So this year, there's a little string attached to our T-shirt sharing. We're asking the recipients to email or upload (or send us a snapshot via snail mail) a photo of themselves wearing the T-shirt, wherever they happen to be. With those photos, we will create a world map that shows how our T-shirts pop up around the world.

More importantly, we want this year's T-shirt to help encourage another type of global connection. Since we're all about sharing stories here at Hammock, we decided to use our T-shirt tradition to support some children who are ready to tell their own. For every five photos added to the map, we're donating one laptop to the educational efforts of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation in developing countries. (Up to 20 laptops!)

Revenge could have been the keyword for The 14th Annual Nashville Area Literacy Council's Spelling Bee on Sept. 27. After a rousing, come-from-behind, catch-the-ball-as-it-caressed-the-grass win in 2005, Hammock's torrid spelling team got the bird on Kookaburra last year. So the pressure was on the litigious team from Waller Lansden law firm as they came back this year to defend their title. A new challenger, from McNeely Pigott Fox & Atkinson PR had cast a personal challenge at Hammock.

So Team Hammock -- Captain Jamie "Depp-adidoo" Roberts, Megan "I wasn't THAT good!" Goodchild, and Bill "AARPman" Hudgins -- had a lot riding on them.

The pirate theme for the evening played into a number of the word choices. Cap'n Jamie saved our soy bacon by knowing that "zucchini" had 2 C's. Bosun Bill thought it had one C and 2 Ns, which would have squashed us. The field of 10 was quickly whittled to 4 --Hammock, MPF&A, American Legal Services, and Waller. The latter two quickly fell, leaving the one-time champ and the new kids in a spell down.

The first word went to Hammock and nearly scuttled us -- pronounced as "key," the word "quay" meaning a structure in a harbor was familiar to all of us as "cay" from Caribbean forays. A lucky guess turned out right. Then the spinmeisters tripped over annihilate, which Hammock handled with ease, as we did the next word, "braggadocio." Which we were filled with as it won the contest.

The fallen foes will long remember the event as the day they almost beat Cap'n Jamie and her merry crew!

No amount of jet lag or intense desire to sleep late could keep Rex, Jamie, Susie and I from waking up early this past Saturday, putting on the work clothes and taking part in Hands on Nashville Day, a day of volunteering that brings together more than 1,500 volunteers each year to spruce up some of Metro Nashville's public schools (more on the sprucing later).

The four of us joined up with a team of local bloggers -- officially named Mr. Roboto's Team Blogger Sponsored by Hammock Publishing and Amerigo's, which was led by my favorite blogger of all time, Mr. Roboto (Sorry, Rex) -- at Percy Priest Elementary School. Our objective: to clean, construct, mulch, prune, paint and organize.

Sure, there was chit chat and excessive donut consumption, but there was also hard work. Susie and Jamie mulched and pruned. Rex put together a corner cabinet for a classroom. I cleaned doorknobs and helped install shelves. The principal of the school was even there to help us find the tools we needed (and to make sure all the tools were returned) and to tell us how much she appreciated the work.

Overall, a good -- and feel-good -- time was had by all.