Last night was rough, but it was largely self-inflicted. I've finally found a way to get to sleep at a reasonable (for me) hour every night, but last night the app didn't work! So in order to get to sleep, I decided I had to uninstall and reinstall the app. I couldn't remember the login information, so I had to get out of bed, turn on lights, and find the sheet where I've written down all my user names and passwords.

What app? Well, it's like this. Since I got my iPhone in January, I've been plugging it into a speaker dock next to my bed and letting it charge all night. It has worked well, but it took me several months to figure out how best to use it. Music doesn't put me to sleep; that's one thing I learned early on. Not even electronica or slow jams, which sometimes get me nodding off when they come on during the day.

It's a shame, too, because I have a lot of my own music on my phone, and I have several apps that will play just about any kind of music I might want to hear. The best, by the way, are Pandora and Tune-in Radio. The first plays music by genre (any genre; you can't think of a genre they don't have, and if they don't have it they'll invent it for you), and the other will play almost any radio station worldwide that has an Internet feed. That's a lot of variety.

But I didn't subscribe to XM Radio for nothing, and the Sirius/XM app not only plays all the same stations as my regular satellite radio, but it also plays a bunch more that I never got before the phone. For some reason, the app can be wonky, hence the bad night. I think I'll remember the login info the next time this happens, though.

The station that puts me to sleep every night (when it works) is Book Radio. I can count on some droning voice to knock me out at that time of night. I don't even know what the station puts on during the day, but late at night I've been listening to the memoirs of Winston Churchill's last secretary.

It's not that the story isn't interesting (but it really isn't, at least not enough to make me perk up and pay attention). It's that it's read by the author, in a very soothing drone. It rarely takes him more than ten minutes to put me to sleep, for which I'm grateful. And the app shuts itself off. I'm grateful for that, too.

That's not a book review, by the way. I'd guess the book would be interesting to anyone who knows who Churchill was, and enlightening for those who don't. And the audio version is probably okay, too. Otherwise, the only reason they would put it on the radio would be to help people like me get to sleep.

The irony of getting out of bed and mucking madly about to try to fix something that's supposed to lull me to sleep isn't lost on me. But that won't stop me from doing the same thing again tonight, should the need arise.

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Naturally, I overslept this morning and didn't wake up until the phone rang for the first time. If you guessed that it was the Boss, and that he kept me hopping all morning, you would be correct. You might also think that would make for a bad start to a bad day, but it was fine, although I faded out a few times in the late afternoon. And any day that ends with the Giants winning is a good day, period.

How about our Petaluma Little League team, too, beating the big boys from San Antonio to move on to the U.S. championship game? I thought the Texas team was as strong a group as I've seen at the Little League World Series, but I guess I underestimated the local kids. Sorry, guys. That won't happen again, and good luck Saturday against Goodlettsville, Tennessee.