PhoneBoy Says

Part of this evenings preparations for Christmas day included cleaning the oven. Since we have a self-cleaning oven, we turned it on to clean and didn't think twice about it. Until the smoke detectors started going off throughout the house.

Obviously, Christmas Eve is not a night you want to unduly wake up your kids. Jaden, of course, woke up, but Alisa was smart and instantly ran to Jaden's room to deal with him while I scurried about trying to figure out the best way to get the "smoke" out of the house. Certainly no visible smoke, but whatever the self-cleaning oven does, the smoke detectors don't like it.

Gracie, despite being sick, manage to sleep through the entire ordeal. I'm not sure if I should be relieved about that or not in general, though in this specific instance I am glad it didn't wake her.

Meanwhile, I now have a headache. Not a piercing heading, but a kind of dull, throbbing headache. Whether it's the fumes from the self-cleaning oven that's causing it, those smoke alarms, or a combination of the two, I have no idea. But I think it's going to be a while before I will be able to sleep.

If it's not your holiday, then have a happy day.

Even though I moved up to Washington State in the late 1990s, my heart has always been in San Francisco. Growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s when the 49ers grew into a powerhouse team, with plenty of memories of watching Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Brent Jones, Roger Craig, Dwight Clark, Freddie Solomon, and many others, it's hard not to leave my heart there, even though those glory days are long gone.

I don't follow football that closely now that I've got kids and my weekends are busy playing with them. Just as well given the 49ers have been playing like crap for the past several years now. However, I did kind of "perk up" when I heard that the 49ers have a shot--a rather slim one at that--of making the playoffs this year. In short, the Seahawks have to lose their last two games and the 49ers have to win their last two games.

Looking at this weekend's games, Seattle is up against San Diego. San Diego is currently kicking butt and taking names. I would expect hope that the Chargers will hand Seattle their ass on Sunday. I'm pretty sure that the 49ers will beat the Cards. Of course, that's what I want to happen, whether it will or not is a different story. But you can bet I'll be checking in on ESPN via my mobile phone. Next weekend, things look a little more dicey. Seattle is playing Tampa Bay, which is not playing so well this year. San Fran is up against Denver. Denver is also in the playoff hunt. That could be a close game.

I don't hold out a lot of hope that my boys in Red and Gold will pull it out this year. Even if they do make the playoffs, I expect they will get their asses handed to them in the first or second round. The only reason they are in the playoff hunt at all is because Seattle has been sucking big time this year, mostly because they lost both their quarterback and running back at various times of the year.

What a difference a few hours makes.

Something I do for my wife on occasion is burn CDs. Specifically, I download episodes of Dr. Joy Brown's radio show from iTunes and, when I get enough of them and I actually remember to do it, burn them to CDs she can play in the car.

I suppose I could download the shows any number of ways. The main reason for using iTunes is that I can easily take a group of MP3 and say "burn to CD," it realizes that there isn't any possible way for 24 "hours" of Dr. Joy can't possibly fit on one CD (by the way, after you strip out all the commercials, a "radio hour" is about 36 minutes), and it offers to burn the playlist across multiple CDs. I simply label the CDs using a Sharpie, stack them up, and feed them to my MacBook as necessary. The whole process takes about 6 minutes per CD and aside from prepping the CDs and the playlist, the process is fairly automatic.

Of course, the whole reason for going through these machinations is that the wife prefers the low-tech solution, or rather the high-tech solutions aren't smart enough to cope with things like the car turning off or even switching cars. The CD players in the car will remember where they were when you last turned on the car. Burning CDs is cheap and cheerful, albeit wasteful since the CDs are listened to once and tossed. I suppose it's a good thing I buy them at Costco where they are dirt cheap.

How do you take your tea or coffee?
Submitted by Vasquez.

If it's coffee I make myself, cream, no sweetener. If someone else made it, then I have to cut it with hot water to make it drinkable because, quite frankly, I can't handle all the bitterness. Apparently I didn't inherent my taste in coffee from my old man.