The Yenta children are off at Jewish camp for a few weeks, where they are presumably learning a rock ‘n’ roll version of the birkat hamazon and the finer points of a gaga slam.

Of course, I am handling this terribly, roaming around their empty rooms looking for things to clean and carrying the dog around like a baby.

However, I have to say I am enjoying the opportunity to have some much-heralded Alone Time with their father. You probably think I mean sex in the kitchen and romantic candlelit meals and all the exciting activities that get pushed to the back of the minivan when they are children around. But really, I’m just happy to have an interaction with him that doesn’t involve commentary from the peanut gallery.

All this week we’ve been having conversations that start out with things like “This incredible thing happened at work–” or “I have extremely important news about our mortgage refinancing–” then silence, as we wait for someone to interrupt with “I saw a three-dogged dog today! It was brown and ate a muffin off the street. When are we getting another dog? Another dog! Another dog!”

So yes, while the nest feels a little empty, there’s the quiet. And the sex in the kitchen.

Naturally, I don’t want my children to suspect for a single minute they are not missed while they are at camp. In addition to letters and one-way emails, I send an occasional care package because hearing one’s name at mail call is a scientifically-proven remedy for any sort of homesickness. Well, maybe it’s not scientific. But I remember when I was a camper, the moment a care package arrived, an expectant buoyancy filled the cabin, giving its recipient a bit of fame and the rest of us a “goodygoodygoody” anticipation. Even though we all knew that if it was candy, it would be immediately confiscated and eaten loudly at midnight by our counselors.

Bruce Feiler had a piece in the NYT Sunday Style section about the “The Care-Package Wars,” detailing how many summer camps have put the kabosh on sending edible treats and potentially destructive items like water balloons to campers. My experience as a Jewish camper is food has never been an allowable item and that’s just fine, but apparently some parents go insane trying to get a pack of Jolly Ranchers to their kid. I mean, hiding it in a pack of tissues and then hot-gluing the top back on? That is some sick messaging, parents.

Even more meshuggah are the folks who smuggle their campers a cell phone. Really? If your kid can’t give up texting for a few weeks so their hands are freed up to shoot a bow and arrow or tie a lanyard, maybe you’re wasting those thousands of dollars at camp when perhaps therapy would be more appropriate.

This Yenta spent ten bucks at the dollar store on mini UNO decks, some finger flashlights and a pair of waterproof sandals on clearance. I’m of the thinking that it doesn’t matter so much what you send, but that you put stickers on the outside.

Some of the parents in Feiler’s article attribute their package panic to “keeping up,” as if a truly stellar care parcel can ensure one’s child’s popularity. Such overt social strategizing from a distance seems ridiculous, but maybe I’m in denial.

Does a mega pack of temporary tattoos count as overparenting? I just thought it would be fun for everyone to slap on a full sleeve for Shabbat.

Muchas thank yous to all those who helped the Yenta continue my reign as Best Local Blogger as voted by the readers of Connect Savannah!

As I rambled in my acceptance speech at Tuesday’s awards party, I’m not really sure why or how a loud Jewish hippie mama has continued to capture the attention and slaving adoration of a mostly conservative, very Christian Southern city, but life’s weird.

I’m just grateful you’ve bore with me this year as I’ve had to switch-up being a full-time yenta to becoming Connect’s community editor and Civil Society columnist. There’s just of much of me to read, but it’s mostly here these days.

Hoops, hollers and kvells to El Yenta Man, who was voted Best Personal Trainer! StrongGym was also voted runner up for Best Fitness Club after only a year in business. Guess that makes us a power couple. If you need EYM, he’ll be in the backyard powering up the lawn mower.

Bill Dawers, the gracious runner up for Best Blogger and many-yeared king of the Best Newspaper Columnist category (who pointed out that there’s no way this thing is rigged if he, “a freelancer for a rival publication” keeps winning), is also a damn fine photographer; check some pretty party pictures here.

Because I have a small black cloud of disaster that follows me and occasionally rains down hilarious irony, you may notice that things look a little different around here. I woke up two days ago to write this acceptance post and found that nine years worth of blog posts had melted into a soup of gobdelgooky HTML code: Something exploded in the bowels of my server and would all still be a hideous mess if not for Adam Singer, rabbi and chief geek at AJ Singer Studios, his website design company.

Not only did he transfer everything over to a new site and get things working again, I think he may have kashered my WordPress platform. He gets my vote for Best Tech Support next year!

UPDATE: Here’s this week’s Civil Society Column, “All Hail the Geeks,” on WordPress wonder woman Jane Wells.

Nu, such a lovely tribute to the Jewish mother, acknowledging the endless chores and sacrifices of motherhood. Even if the serene mother in this video has not a hair in her sheitel out of place nor does her frying pan contain a speck of stubborn cooked-on gristle.

And nevermind that it’s basically a promo for Israeli company Wissotzky Tea. Though the lady exudes the calm that I couldn’t achieve even with a column of Xanax, the low-pro product placement keeps it classy:

Tea makes a nice Mother’s Day present, no doubt. I loooooves me some tea. Every day. With milk and honey.

But, as I argue in this week’s Civil Society Column, there is no greater gift to the modern mother than…birth control.

Read it here.

This week in wacky Southern public school news: A seventh-grade social studies teacher has been indicted for assault and battery after calling a student “a Jew” and dragging him under a desk.

Witnesses told police that Patricia Mulholland grabbed the kid by the collar when he got up to sharpen his pencil with the command “Come here, Jew.” The she lugged him under a table and said “This is what the Nazis do to the Jews!”

Sound like someone mixed some Percoset with her morning coffee after staying up too late on WorldNetDaily.com. But Mulholland’s lawyer claims she was just employing a creative lesson about the Holocaust.

“What was a demonstrative attempt to teach about World War II and the Holocaust has been taken to mean an anti-Semitic rant and it was nothing like that,” said her attorney, Robert Ferguson.

Hmm, noting that she was quoted as declaring what Nazis do in the present tense, I’m gonna have to go with the Percoset defense.

Police haven’t released the information on whether the student was Jewish or not; if he was, he’s going to have a helluva bar mitzvah speech.

Isn’t middle school awkward enough without your teachers going batsh*t?

I want to be Jane Fishman when I grow up.

A few weeks back I had the delight of spending a morning with the writer and gardener known and loved around these parts for her funny, thoughtful prose in the Savannah Morning News and her whomping bi-yearly plant swaps, where last October I picked up some kind of overachieving looping-leafed lily that’s giving the fig ivy a run for space.

(Yes, we just missed the April swap, dangit. I must’ve been at a kid soccer game, or at synagogue, or most likely, digging around in my own cucumber seedlings and chasing the chickens away from the kale.)

Jane’s as hilarious and unpretentious as they come, cheerfully admitting to lackadaisical watering and writing habits. Still, she manages to grow a whole lot of food and flowers and a weekly column to boot, so she can’t possibly be as lazy as she claims. She also recently published a book, The Dirt on Jane, so actually, I’m not buying the slacker routine at all.

I first met Jane at synagogue probably 17 years ago, which she will tell you must have been some special occasion since she’s not much into organized religion. It was my first visit to Savannah to see the boy-who-would-become-my-husband’s hometown, and of course, the nice lady-who-would-become-my-mother-in-law wanted to show me the gorgeous historic temple where she served as a docent. For whatever reason, Jane attended the same Friday night service, and when my future MIL saw her at the kiddush, she insisted we be introduced because we had much in common since back then, as now, I was a newspaper columnist myself.

I wasn’t so young and arrogant that I couldn’t tell there was no way I was in this lady’s league, and I felt a little shy when I came face to face with that saucy smile and twinkling eyes.

She looked me up and down and said, “San Francisco, huh?” and then just laughed and patted me on the shoulder. We toasted bagels.

Years later, after my MIL got sick and it was time to move ourselves to the deep and dirty South to help, I consoled myself that any place where a Jewish pot-growing lesbian wrote for the daily paper couldn’t be too backwards.

Ms. Jane was entertaining some out of town guests when I stopped by Foxy Loxy; that’s Jane in the middle, surrounded by old Arkansas pals Rae Hahn (left) and Elaine Burks. Foxy as the sign says, right?

It got funny fast. Rae, whose been a hippie longer than I’ve been alive and I am NOT so young, and Jane were batting old stories about living at the Eureka Springs, AK commune back and forth when I noticed Rae was wearing a chai.

“Many Jews in Arkansas?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes and said, “You know what the dental hygienist said about my necklace the other day? ‘What a cute little dog!’ Can you believe that?”

We all cracked up. A chai as a little dog? Only Jews could belly laugh over this. Then the subject of making homemade lox came up, and I was about to share my recipe when Rae interrupted with “First, you get a boat…”

More cackling. I wanted to go home with these women, but I had to get back to work. If I keep on writing and gardening and smoking a joint or two (btw, Happy 4/20, y’all!) maybe I’ll earn my place.

Before I left, Jane kindly signed a copy of her book, which I read over the weekend instead of turning the compost and thinning the beet seedlings.

Bearing a picture of the author as the Collard Green Queen wearing a boa of leafy greens, The Dirt on Jane is an “anti-memoir” about life in Savannah’s not-so-enviable neighborhoods and shlepping to Detroit to visit her ailing mother, who was deteriorating from dementia, much like my MIL is now. I shed tears over a few chapters, but mostly laughed and nodded my head, murmuring “Say it, sister.”

Buy it locally (at The Book Lady and E. Shaver’s Booksellers) or if you must, online.

Then, VOTE for it for “Best Local Book” in Connect’s Best of Savannah poll. (Do it, for me. I want to party with Jane at the awards ceremony.)

I never did get around to giving Rae my lox recipe, so here it is:

Cover a nice fillet of wild-caught salmon with two parts kosher salt, one part brown sugar and some chopped dill. Stick it in a plastic bag and chill it overnight in the fridge, maybe to the next afternoon. Rinse off and pat dry. Serve on bagels or eat forkfuls plain, depending on your munchie intensity.