President Barack Obama and the First Family will rent the bucolic Blue Heron Farm off South Road in Chilmark for their vacation during the last week of August.

The 28.5-acre property some five hundred yards down Cobb’s Hill Road, spans the Chilmark and West Tisbury town line and overlooks Town Cove, the westernmost finger of the Tisbury Great Pond.

With $550,000 due to be transferred into its bank account by this time next week, the Edgartown affordable housing trust is preparing to try a new scheme that is intended to give a boost for affordable housing in town.

The scheme involves buying low-cost homes at the bottom of the market for renovation and resale as affordable housing.

And now there is some cash to do it.

For Mike Creato of Classic Aviators this is a crunch year and, while other business owners are jumping up and down about next month’s visit by President Obama, he’s fretting over the possibility that the First Family’s Island vacation will ruin his fragile biplane tours enterprise at Katama Airfield.

The massive security effort required to accommodate a Vineyard vacation for President Obama and the First Family next month is now under way, as recession-stricken Island businesspeople fix their sights, with broadening smiles, on August.

Local and state officials relevant to security and law enforcement on land, sea and air have been contacted by the U.S. Secret Service and told to direct all media queries to its Boston headquarters.

The spokesman there did not return calls yesterday and Wednesday.

Simon Athearn of Morning Glory was making hay while the sun shone yesterday, though he wasn’t yet ready to bet the farm — just a few acres in fact, out in Katama.

An important study of tick-bourne illnesses conducted last fall by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) revealed high rates of Lyme disease, rocky mountain spotted fever group and anaplasmosis in members of the Wampanoag tribe and other Vineyarders.