So last night we had made a commitment to a family get-together at takaza‘s sister’s which was cancelled at the last minute, literally as we were walking out the door. That was fine by me since I had been feeling so-so all afternoon, so I stumbled upstairs and took a nap. A few hours later I felt ever so much better, although it made any hopes of being social that night just too darn late. Dan tended to the trick or treaters (all six of them) with the candy we had intended to bring to the party. Instead, we spent the evening catching up on Tivo and heading to bed early. Woo, party guys, we are! 🙂

I’ve spent the morning giving some thought to my newspaper subscription to the Chicago Tribune. I currently get the paper delivered seven days a week, but I’m pretty dissatisfied. Since their grand redesign earlier this year, they have moved to making the paper 50% advertising/50% content, and a good portion of the content is from the Associated Press, which I can read for free online from numerous outlets. While their local coverage is serviceable, their world coverage has been pretty lacking, reducing many important stories to a one-sentence blurb on a hard-to-read world map – very USA Today-esque. They also cut out a couple of comics that I liked and shrank the rest. I’ve been giving thought to dropping my subscription but didn’t have a good alternative. I’m a news junkie, and I like to know not just what’s going on in the world but what it means as well. NPR gives a nice glimpse of that but since I only have a 5-10 minute commute, that doesn’t give me a lot of listening time.

Earlier this week there was the big story that the Christian Science Monitor was going to cease daily paper publication and move to a net-only presence with a paper version mailed out weekly. This reminded me of the late, lamented Monitor Radio. That was a radio show that played on various NPR outlets until 1997 that I always enjoyed and respected. Knowing the quality of CSM’s reporting, I checked out their daily “treeless” edition, a 20-page PDF that is emailed every morning. With that, I think I may have found a good replacement for the Tribune. I subscribe to many different RSS feeds using Google Reader, so while I get my world and national news from the Monitor, I can get local news with feeds from the Tribune, the Sun-Times, the Daily Herald, and the News-Sun, all of which are updated continuously. I already follow several blogs on the Tribune’s site (The Stew and Tower Ticker) so I get the content I like there before it ever sees print. Comics? The Houston Chronicle lets you build your own comics page for free. Yeah, you don’t get Sunday comics, but to be honest those mostly suck anyway.

Looks like I’ve found my new media mix!