It's too early for any color on the redbuds of Madison, Wisconsin.

Slow start.

It's a rainy day here in Madison. The rain is knocking the petals off the red bud trees I've been enjoying just outside my dining room window for the last couple weeks. I'm getting a late start blogging (and everything else) today, because I lost about three hours of sleep in the middle of the night after someone dialing a wrong number woke me up at 2 a.m. People, when you're making phone calls in the middle of the night, be especially careful about the right number!

Now, I'm seeing that, during the night, my Site Meter clicked up over 1.5 million. That's pretty cool. It just hit 1 million around the 31st of January, a year and a half month after it began. Anyway, this traffic milestone -- and thanks for reading! -- is making me sorry I don't have some solid blogginess for you yet today.

So, I need to do some paper-reading and I want to do a little blogging. I've got an exam to write and an exam to grade and I'm working on a presentation for the local Bar Association about the Supreme Court's constitutional cases this term. Unfortunately, the cases I'm most interested in will not come out in time for my talk (next Tuesday). Thinking back over the term so far, I'm not coming up with much constitutional law of significance, especially outside of the criminal law area. There is the death penalty case (about those who commit their crimes at an early age), but what else?

UPDATE: That's "cases" not "case" I'm most interested in. What are they? The medical marijuana case (Raich) and the case about the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (Cutter). There's also the negative commerce clause case about wine importation (Granholm).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ambivablog writes about blogging guilt (and links here).

Late afternoon, redbud reflected in the glass table.

Redbud.

What redbud looks like today in Madison.

A slow blog day.

It's been a long, hard day, beginning with the lack of bloggish inspiration with what was for me the excessively Pope-focused news. But there was a lot to do at the law school, including teaching one of the last Constitutional Law classes of the semester. Later, it seemed like a good idea to spend $50+ getting my toenails painted "Pompeii Purple," to have my chiropractor pop my vertabrae into a more appropriate position, and to pick up a shredded beef burrito at Chipotle. I arrive home and walk up the front path, under the arch formed by my two redbud trees, which are in bloom now. All I really want to do is to pour a glass of wine, unwrap my burrito, and turn on the television. A nice, quiet evening at home. Maybe I'll find something bloggable -- there's always the "American Idol" results show -- and I'll be back to replenish the blog.