In our current episode of life at the Boone Mellow Mushroom ...

... there was a lot of excitement. A beautiful redhead with big blue eyes showed up with her proud dad. She's only 10 months old and made a horrible face when Clemens held her.

Young Máeráed ignored all of the hubbub and was busy writing something on her laptop. In fact she paid no attention to Clemens or anyone else until she was done. Then she immediately popped over to my table as if to say she was ready for me to pay attention to her. I asked her what her project was and she said it was a PowerPoint presentation about President Obama. She even has a big pretty picture of his Certification of Live Birth from the state of Hawaii. Certification - linguistically that is what a 'Certificate' is. A 'certification.' Even a 7 year old knows this.

She was so excited about her project that she wrote to Obama telling him about it. It was a beautiful hand written note. In this get-it-done-immediately slipshod world of e-mail and twitter, how many of you take the time to hand write a note? Or course, she should have used a fountain pen, but still. ..

Anyway, Máeráed being Máeráed, she is already wondering why she hasn't heard from the guy. Doesn't he take the time to answer HAND WRITTEN notes from 7 year old Irish-Americans!!??

Well, he has an excuse, I suppose. A lot, and I mean a lot, of mail. In fact the process of answering all of it took a whole long article in The Washington Post to explain how it is done, and how Obama reads 10 randomly chosen pieces of mail every night. Some of which he actually answers with a HAND WRITTEN note on special note cards. With a BLACK FOUNTAIN PEN.

I'm telling you, the man walks on water.

Back in the steaming swamp like morass of the unnamed port city to our south ...

... which actually isn't so bad. In fact, it was Carmen who was complaining about the heat today. I was fine, staying at Mother's condo with the little lummox while Carmen and her sister Bananny went off to the Port City Sasparilla Art Show. They were out in the sun. I went for a long walk with the lummox under the shade of the trees.

Bananny noticed that the little lummox seems to be a little tired, maybe even depressed after 6 days here in the fun and sun. Six long days of having his lunatic canine cousin jumping up and down on his head. Six days of boring walks around the same neighborhood with no snow and no ice.

I think he will be glad to get back up to the slow mellow life in the foothills of North Carolina, gateway to the High Country.

It makes me a little nervous sometimes how much alike we are.