One of my New Year's Resolutions was to have more balance in my life. In this vein, I'm now attempting to be more of a "real person" and do more than just work, eat, and sleep. The result is that I am often more tired, but I feel a whole lot better about life in general and a whole lot more normal.

We have several sources that I check for free/cheap events in our local area, and I thought I'd share just in case any of you want to be real people, too! Though these are specific to the Claremont area, I'm sure there are similar things in your area.

1) Claremont Colleges Event Calendar One of the perks of being married to a perpetual student/professor-to-be is that we will always live in a college town. And colleges, especially awesome colleges, have great free or inexpensive events constantly going on during the school year. We have attended many lectures, concerts, arts events, and other events just by keeping tabs on the school's central calendar. Not all of the colleges' events make it onto this central calendar, but an awful lot do.

2) Our local NPR station's event calendar We love NPR, and we love NPR events. Last night we went to a StoryCorp listening events that knocked our socks off. NPR's calendar lists all kind of cool events, many of which actually have nothing to do with NPR. Some of the events are free, some are cheap, and some aren't so cheap.

3) City of Claremont's website Our town often makes Richard and I stop and say, "Wow. We live in AMERICA." We call it the Star's Hollow of the West. (I know many of you Texans are not believing that a town in California could love America, but there you have it.) The patriotic package is complete with events that could only happen in small-town America: parades, free concerts in the park, town barbecue, firefighter's pancake breakfasts. If you've seen it on TV in some small town, it happens in Claremont.

4) Groupon and LivingSocial You've probably heard of both of these sites, but the idea is you buy gift certificates to restaurants, services, and events at a huge discount. We've only actually bought one, but I like seeing what's going on in our area.

So there are my ideas, do you have any others?