Catching up on the last week…  I met up with a homeless guy who we had taken in a few years back.  He’s a modern day “hobo,” if you will.  He has a bi-polar disorder and how it manifests is: he doesn’t do well in one place for long.  He has traveled the country (hitchhiking, on buses…) the past 20 years.  Coincidentally, I have extensively traveled the country the past 22 years doing research and campaigning.  While my wife Liz wouldn’t call it a bi-polar disorder, she has referred to it (on her bad days) as being: “nuts.”  Okay so we’re not ahead in the polls, yet…   Some of this campaigning has taken our 16-year-old daughter, Sarah, and I on a recent swing through northwest Ohio.  (Sarah just got her temporary driving permit, and I have to believe this was a more pressure packed trip than all the other presidential candidates experienced last week — Herman Cain notwithstanding — combined.)   One of our stops was at tiny Van Buren, Ohio, where I put up a campaign flier on the town bulletin board under “Community Events.”  Well if I win, people in Van Buren would consider me being there a “community event,” right?  In Upper Sandusky, Ohio (pop. 6,364), I did a little impromptu stumping at the Beca House Coffee Shop downtown.  As we were leaving this quintessential, midwestern small town later, against a backdrop of kids walking home from school, colorful fall leaves… Sarah and I noticed an even more colorful (and graphic) “Girls Gone Wild” tour bus parked in front of a tavern downtown, apparently there to put on a semi-erotic show that night.  I couldn’t help but think:  “Girls Gone Wild / Society Gone Nuts.”  …I rounded out the week by attending a seminar on “Prmitive Native Skills” with our eight-year-old son Jonathan at Bluffton University.  Wilderness Instructor Clint Myers fascinated some 70 students with demonstrations of how Native Americans lived (hunting, fishing, making clothes…) before the White man got here.  When Myers got to the demonstration about starting fires (without matches), he held up a gray rock and asked the class what kind of rock it was.  70 college students stared blankly, until our Jonathan’s hand tentatively went up in the back.  “It’s a flint rock,” he said.  (For homeschooling Jonathan has been reading a lot of wilderness literature lately.)  All 70 heads turned in unison, and apparently in awe.  Or at least they were impressed, as was I — who didn’t know what it was either.  Myers then started a small fire with the rock, until one of the more technologically advanced students said if it got any bigger “…the sprinkler system would probably come on.”  And that was that.  Note:  Wilderness instructor Clint Myers said the average American uses 120 gallons of water a day (drinking, cooking, cleaning, flushing toilets, watering lawns…)  Meanwhile in the developing countries, many people use a pail of water a day, if that.  And often times it’s not clean water.  On a stop in Stephens Point, Wisconsin, we interviewed University of Wisconsin Environmental Professor George Kraft.  He said we are running into water problems worldwide, in part, because the developing countries are over-using water.  Thus, our administration would ask Americans to cut back on their water use significantly and fund many more water projects in the Third World.  “Common sense for the common good,” worldwide.