I follow 163 feeds these days, and if I don't go in and check them at least 4 or 5 times a day, it gets to be overwhelming trying to keep up with them. There are just too many good and interesting posts floating around. Holidays are especially bad. I like to spend time with my family and daughter and don't check my feeds during weekends or vacation periods. I always come back from 3 day weekends with 250 posts to catch up on, and actually read a decent portion of them. It takes a good two hours to catch up once I follow everybody's links and post comments and whatnot, while still marking many of them as read even when not reading them (I hate having unread posts. Those bold posts hanging around bug the crap out of me!!)
Anyways, Happy New Year to all and good luck catching up on your posts over the holidays, its a lot of work! Thankfully, the holidays also keep many of us from posting very much anyways, so I won't be posting again until next week sometime, to save you the hassle of having to do a Mark All As Read on my blog, if you subscribe.