Sounds like your next brew will be a "Bear" beer of some sort, Randy. Very nice!
A couple of comments on mash stirring. You bring up some good points about stirring too much having negative effects by disturbing the grain bed and possibly introducing hot-side oxidation. You can negate the oxidation by gently stirring and the grain bed can be reset using a recirculation, aka, Vorlauf (http://www.homebrewtalk.com/wiki/index.php/Vorlauf) to set the grain bed prior to sparging and lautering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lautering). You definitely do not want to be vigorous in any of these activities, though, or you introduce a number of problems.
I prefer to gently stir the mash every 15 minutes or so to reduce cool spots in the mash and ensure the temperature is pretty even. Check out some good discussions on vorlaufing, stirring and lautering at the following URLs.
- To Vorlauf or Not to vorlauf: http://www.realbeer.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=20465
- How often to stir mash? http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/how-often-stir-mash-79687/
- Stir the mash??? http://forum.northernbrewer.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=14988&start=0