The Husband and I made a trip to the library yesterday afternoon. Because of our aforementioned financial status, we’ve stopped buying books and magazines. In all honesty, I almost never buy new books any more anyway. My author friends would tell me that used bookstores steal revenue from authors, but at the same time, I don’t have the funds to commit $25 every time a new book I want to read comes out, so I compromise.

Interestingly, the library is even a better deal than used bookstores; you get to read new books much sooner after they come out than if you had to wait for them to show up at the used bookstore, and you get to read them for FREE!

Now, books are my crack, and not actually owning the book with which I’ve just fallen in love is something of an adjustment for me, but it’s not as bad as I’d thought it would be.

Anyway, after picking up the next installment in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials sequence, I moseyed over to the periodicals section and sat down with the latest Martha Stewart Living magazine. I like Martha. She’s a little odd, and more than a little OCD, I think, but I love the photography and design of her magazines, and I aspire to be crafty and a homemaking diva, so I like to look at her magazines. I almost never pay the cover price for them, though.

As I was flipping through the beautifully designed pages of cookie recipes and Valentine’s Day ideas, it occurred to me that she has an equally beautifully designed website, and nearly all of the information in the magazine is available for free on said website — or will be, as soon as next months’ magazine hits newsstands. So, I took out the little notebook I carry in my purse and made a note of all the articles that were interesting to me, that I might want to look up later.

Voila! Instant savings. Instead of buying the magazine, I now have a reminder to myself of the knowledge I might want to retain from it, and a way of obtaining said knowledge for free.

You always learn something at the library.