I’m waiting with bated breath to see how the 2014 mid-term elections turn out. Not only do we have a lot going on nationally, but in Florida we’ve got a governor’s race between the incumbent crook, Rick Scott, and the former crook, Charlie Crist. The question before the voters is which one is truly the lesser of two evils.

Because, you see, before Charlie Crist was a Democrat, he was the former Republican governor of Florida. He switched when he found out just how far the crazy Tea Partiers had taken over the main-stream Republican party. His biggest political hurt was when he decided to not run for a second term as governor in 2010, instead running for the Senate. Unfortunately his opponent was Marco Rubio. Rubio, with the backing of the far right crazies (the aforementioned Tea Party Republicans) lost. With Rubio as senator and Scott as governor Florida has had a pretty lousy last four years, in part to Crist’s bad judgement not to run for governor. And so here we are the weekend before the first Tuesday in November, hoping we can fix some of this political screwup.

In the meantime the price of gas has been dropping and dropping rather quickly. Today I paid $2.85/gallon to fill my Prius. I don’t know if this rapid price drop is due to political shenanigans or what; you know, all those Democrats trying to buy us off and keep control of the Senate… In any event, it’s a good dollar from it’s high of $4.14 back in 2008. I didn’t have the sense to record that event, but I did record the following nearly four years later in April 2012. At the time I made this photo I wrote that I was certain it would go as high as $5/gallon by the summer. I was thankfully wrong.

The same day I recorded this price for regular, I also recorded this consumption (measured in miles/gallon) on my 2009 Prius. This was how my drive, one way, from work back to home. 66.6 MPG was a bit high; I managed the high 50s most of the time. But it was good to have that car, and to use as little gas as possible during my daily commute. The 2009 Prius used, on average, 1/3 the amount of gas my prior car used, a Kia Sorento.

I bought the Prius in 2009, a year after the shock of filling that Kia up with very expensive gas. Gas did drop back below $4/gallon, just barely. After that experience I made a promise to myself I’d never again drive any car that couldn’t get at least 50MPG, and I’ve kept that promise ever since. Driving efficiently with a car like the Prius as well as only when necessary is one big reason I believe the price is dropping the way it has. It takes time, sometimes years, before efficiency all around begins to have its effect, but I’m quite sure that my use of the Prius along with a lot of other Prius’ and other ways to reduce fossil fuel use is why gas prices are dropping.

These are very interesting times.