I hope all of you had a pleasant holiday. I certainly did. It was good to see my brother, sister-in-law and nephew for the first time in a year and a half. As I write this, they and my parents are on their way to Gatlinburg for a couple of nights. My brother will leave from there (well, from Knoxville) to return to Southern California; my sister-in-law and nephew will stay a day or two longer, so I’ll get to see them again before they return.

I had a strange little episode on Christmas Eve — someone who wasn’t feeling well snapped at me about something, and I got inexplicably emotional about it. I cried (not sobbing crying, just eyes-red crying) for more than an hour afterward. I’ve been under a lot of stress at work lately, and maybe I just needed a good cry. I just hope the rest of the family doesn’t think I’m nuts.

Among my Christmas gifts was something called a Sonica — a voice-activated universal remote. I’ve already programmed it with the names of several of my favorite cable channels. I can’t seem to get it to work with my DVD player yet. There are four different codes listed for my brand of DVD in the Sonica instruction manual; three of them won’t work, so it must be the fourth one. But the remote won’t take the fourth one, for some odd reason. I can punch in the numbers but the remote will not let me do the last step or confirm that the code was entered. Strange.

The Blogger Idol web site seems to be down, and has been for several days. That’s why I haven’t posted any links yet for my favorite blog entries from this week.

CORRECTION: The Blogger Idol site has apparently been up the whole time. Darren Rowse and I are having some e-mail conversations about why I keep having time-outs when I try to access it.