I don't know why some people are allowed to leave their homes. Yesterday at the post office, I was behind a woman who spent 10 minutes going through a giant purse for stray stamps and trying to add them all up to figure out how much postage she needed to buy. She was followed by a person who thought one of the boxes for sale was a flat-rate priority box, which she filled and handed open to the clerk, saying, "Isn't this $5?" When told that regular mail would be cheaper, she stuffed her items back into two boxes and had the clerk tape them up. Then she realized she had lost a piece of paper, and asked the clerk to retrieve the packages and open them to see if the paper was in them. It wasn't. The clerk re-taped the boxes.

I was making very loud sighs and occasionally saying things like, "Some of us get our packages ready before we leave home." I told the clerk she was a much more patient person than I was.

It seems like every few days brings news of a new record high price for oil. After hovering in the upper $120s for a while, oil has now hit $135 a barrel. Damn. It was $60 a year ago.

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Meanwhile, the price of used fuel-efficient cars has been going up a fair amount.

There a a lot of minivans and fullsized cars in my hood for sale. I've recently seen 2 car service cars for sale. I loved my old car service in B'klyn where people just used their own normal cars, you might be picked up in a civic or camry, not all town cars.

Yeah, and the rumor mills is that Toyota is going to introduce the next gen hybrid system late this year, early next, while Honda is planning to launch a new low-cost hybrid next year.

With these next-gen systems, the plan is to get the hybrid premium over standard IC engines down to around $2K.

My friend who owns a Prius said when gas was cheaper it would have taken about 5 years for the extra cost of the Prius to pay for itself in fuel savings. Now the time is down to a year and a half or two years....

I've been trying to find (unsuccessfully so far) a company that will rent me a hybrid car for the drive up to Canada this summer.

So far I know that Avis and Budget both have hybrids in their fleet, but none in NYC that I can find.

Meanwhile, the price of used fuel-efficient cars has been going up a fair amount.

DAMN, do I love my 8-year-old Toyota Echo. I still get 33-34 mpg. And the tank is only ~10 gallons, so I don't have to take out a bank loan to fill it up.

I've been trying to find (unsuccessfully so far) a company that will rent me a hybrid car for the drive up to Canada this summer.

Well, the extra savings from hybrid technology mostly comes in city driving.

Meanwhile....

The world's premier energy monitor is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast, a shift that reflects deepening pessimism over whether oil companies can keep abreast of booming demand.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of its first attempt to comprehensively assess the condition of the world's top 400 oil fields. Its findings won't be released until November, but the bottom line is already clear: Future crude supplies could be far tighter than previously thought.

...

For several years, the IEA has predicted that supplies of crude and other liquid fuels will arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 87 million barrels a day currently. Now, the agency is worried that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to surpass 100 million barrels a day over the next two decades.

Oopsie....

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Well, the extra savings from hybrid technology mostly comes in city driving.

So you don't think over a 2000 mile drive it would be cheaper to be in a Prius than a Camry? (I'm seriously asking - I don't actually know enough about it to be certain.)