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First off, happy birthday Meredith! Go over and offer your wishes too (and apologize for my pokiness with her gift).

You already know all about my love/hate relationship with RSS; what you don’t already know is that about once every month I hit a mind-bending level of fed-up-ness with the amount of daily reading I want to do but have no time to do. To wit: this morning, I sat down with a bowl of granola and a cup of tea and started picking my way through my list of daily reads. That was at 8:30am. It is now 10:04 am. On any given day I don’t have 1.5 hours for supplementary reading, and I almost never have enough time to go back and catch up on all the posts I’ve missed, so my reading has had to become more and more selective, and then once a month that fed-up-ness hits and I feel like I’m merely skimming and not really engaging in any of it. It is at this point that I usually mollify myself with an investment in hours of filling-up on everything I’ve missed, and so I’m better again, and so starts the cycle again.

Feeling like it might be time to make a change, this being a week of changes, I’ve decided to really put all sorts of solid effort into RSS again, so I’d like you to please tell me what aggregator you use and why you like it. Forget all my railing from the past, I’m starting from scratch this time and my only selection criteria for now is that the reader has to be free (not just for trialing, I mean free, period. I’m not ready for any sort of monetary commitment). Thank you.

And since we’re not exclusively about complaints and whining around here, I’m happy to report that I’m reading books again. Hundreds of books can pile up on my reading shelf (and they have) without inducing any sort of catch-up anxiety in me. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.