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Who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch? (just attend random political get togethers on college campuses…you may have to listen to some weirdos, but they almost always have pizza)

As I’m currently pieceing together a couple of part-time gigs in town and have started the search for a place to live, I’m becoming well aware of the obscene cost of living/pay ratio in this town and am feeling a little lean in the pockets. Blah. I don’t think I’m asking for so much–a one bedroom or maybe even a studio that’s preferably not in a (dark) basement and isn’t a trailer, but so far those criteria seem hard to meet for less than about 500 big ones. Ouch.

For that reason and because, well, I love free, I’ve really been appreciating these two things lately:

• Free music on Amazon.com. Forget Apple and their weird limitations on where you can play the music you legally bought and head over to the Amazon MP3 store. They offer ridiculously good prices–Ben Harper’s newest album can be downloaded for $3.99 this week–downloaded music is automatically added to your iTunes library (if you want it to be), lots of albums include a free track, and they have over 8,000 completely free songs ranging from well-known artists to obscure music from around the globe. You have to download this small Amazon Music Downloader application and then click, click, click your way to free music. I’m so in love with this guilt-free music (did I mention it’s totally FREE?) that I’m thinking of highlighting some good tracks I found over there in a series of posts. Yes.

• Handwriting fonts at Kevin and Amanda’s blog. About a month ago, the woman behind Chez Larsson (a Swedish home organization blog I’m sort of infatuated with) wrote that she got a free font made of her (obviously perfectly neat) handwriting. By the time I got around to writing out all the alphabet and beyond, the site had changed the fonts to $9.95 or $14.95 with special characters. Lame. But when I searched around a bit, I came upon Kevin and Amanda’s blog. I have no clue who these people are, but hundreds of people have submitted handwriting samples to this lady, who then turns your handwriting into a font–which she emails to you for free and posts on her site. I think handwriting fonts can be so amazing when done well (and so cheesy when done poorly–Bradley Hand, anyone?) so I was psyched to download over 300 handwriting fonts with the single click of a button. Wha? Yeah, I know. Awesome. I’m totally submitting my handwriting to her tomorrow. (Amanda, if you read this, pick me!)