SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) – For the second day in a row, President Bush said he wasn’t going to take reporters’ questions on the golf course. Then, he made an exception. “Yes, I talked to my mother.”

And how was she on Mothers’ Day morning? “Slightly sleepy but appreciative,” the president said of his phone conversation with former first lady Barbara Bush.

Then, he answered another question, but a little more testily. Asked about Vice President Cheney’s comments in a newspaper interview last week that he would be on the president’s 2004 re-election ticket, Bush said: “Last November, I said he was going to be on the ticket.” He referred to remarks he had made at a wide-ranging news conference then.

Bush told his golfing companions before teeing off that that he’d had “a rough day yesterday, but I think we’ll recover.”

The president expressed exasperation at several photographers whom he apparently thought had inched too close to his ball’s potential trajectory as he prepared to swing.

“You are one of my favorites and I’d hate to stick this Titlest (golf ball) between your eyes,” he said to one. Photographers quickly scurried back and Bush completed his swing.

Asked after his 18-hole round whether he had played better or worse than on Saturday, Bush said, “Equally as feeble.”

Bush was playing golf for the second day on a private course close to the private residence where he is spending the weekend.

The home is owned by Roland Betts, a Yale classmate and former business partner in the Texas Rangers baseball team.

Bush was to stay here until Monday morning, then campaign for his tax-cut bill Monday and Tuesday in New Mexico, Nebraska and Indiana and visit a tornado stricken area in Missouri Tuesday afternoon.

“It will give me a chance to tell the people who’ve suffered a great loss how much a lot of the nation prays for them and how we’re concerned about them,” the president told reporters in advising them of his newly added plan to survey storm damage.

AP-ES-05-11-03 2053EDT