And, she's back.

I. Can't. Stop. Blogging.

It's like I've been horribly constipated for weeks now, and I took a Creativity Ex-Lax, and now all the crap is issuing forth.

Why?

Because my kids left for camp today.

It's been a rough, rough June for me. The city aint got nothin' on Armonk when it comes to putting parents through the ringer in the final month of school. Between the regularly scheduled lacrosse and baseball games and the make-up games for when regularly scheduled games got rained out, between end-of-school parties and summer-birthday birthday parties and "Field Day" and Moving Up Ceremonies and squeezing in the last of the six required Shabbat Services at the temple, and everyone inviting us over to swim in their pool (poor, woeful us) at the rate of sometimes as many as four playdates in a day (both kids included)...and add to that all of the driving, oh and it is significant here where our school district spans more than 10 miles of country roads that take as much as 25 minutes to traverse....it has been insane, and I haven't had much left in the way of creativity.

This morning, I awoke with the sun with an idea bursting forth, which I wrote up for the Huffington. Still in editorial right now. But I banged it out between dawn and 9:30 a.m., when I took my kids first to Dunkin Donuts and then to the White Plains Bloomingdales parking lot, where the coach buses pick up the Westchester and Connecticut kids to take them to camp.

Came home and crawled into bed. Not surprising since I did the same thing last year. With a house that looks like a cyclone hit it, a gas grill that needs assembling, a yoga practice to practice, I felt overwhelmed. Not to mention vaguely depressed at the sight and sound (lack thereof) of any empty house. In between bouts of disordered sleep, I skimmed the paper and wrote the thing about the fat model.

At some point late in the afternoon, I forced myself onto my mat. Of course, I felt transformed, and the bad mood lifted. I went into action immediately thereafter, cleaning and tidying and making the house into the quiet oasis that makes it so worth it to be here pretty much alone all summer long.

And I read some more.

And I felt like writing more.

And so there it is. And some more as well:

Anyone read about the Supreme Court's death penalty decision this week? It seems that it the SC held that it is unconstitutional for a state to impose the death penalty upon a convicted child-rapist. That's fine by me. I'm not a fan of the death penalty. No, wait. That's an understatement. I actually think that the death penalty is barbaric.

But here's the thing: Notwithstanding the Court's refusal to allow the death penalty in the case at bar, the Court's decision is decidedly PRO-Death Penalty. At least according to the accounts of the case that I read today, it seems that the Court does not feel that it is appropriate to impose the death penalty unless the crime in question involved death. In other words, the death penalty is FINE in some cases. Just not this one.

And then there's this: the Court refused to address any death-penalty precedent for which a case had not been tried in the past, I believe it was 45 years. In other words, the Court limited its precedent-setting ruling to cases in which someone had been sentenced to death in recent history. Thus, the Court essentially ruled on people that were already dead, and refused to rule on situations that might arise in the future where the death penalty might be imposed.

All in all, quite Kangaroo-Court-ish to me.

Off I go to clean some more.

YC