This blog post is rooted in a discussion my husband and I had yesterday regarding a news item I ran across about a 'green' race car that runs on vegetable oil and waste chocolate. I get vegetable oil, but where on earth does waste chocolate come from? Godiva, Ghirardelli, Hershey, Fannie May, and other chocolate candy companies? An admitted chocoholic, I don’t understand waste chocolate; waist chocolate makes far more sense to me.

After talking about what a shame it is to use chocolate as fuel, we began talking about 'green' automotive initiatives in general. My husband's comments, courtesy of Bill Nye, the Science Guy, had me googling faster than an SSC Ultimate Aero.

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Well, maybe it’s not quite time to greet the summer. In astronomical terms, it starts at the moment of the summer solstice, which will occur at precisely 5:45 a.m. on June 21 this year (I know it sounds crazy, but it varies). However, one thing doesn’t vary from year to year: the conventional summer that runs from Memorial Day weekend until Labor Day weekend. Boats, beaches, bikinis, cookouts, and long summer evenings are the hallmarks of the season, as well as mosquitoes, picnic ants, sunburn, and rising gasoline prices. I suppose you could put on some mosquito repellent (or eat a lot of garlic), step on the ants, and wear sunscreen to ward off the first three, but I don’t know what we can do about the last one.

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As I type this, the line at the polling place across the street has finally shown signs of movement. It’s the morning of Nov. 4, and by evening we’ll know who will have the world’s largest bully pulpit for the next four years.

Seeing how the numbers are adding up, I won’t envy the winner. The Institute for Supply Management yesterday released its October numbers on manufacturing, and they weren’t pretty. The organization’s manufacturing index, the PMI, plunged to 38.9 percent, its lowest level in 26 years.

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Last night, continuing our long-standing tradition of "date night," my husband and I went to our favorite local restaurant, Alpha Soda. A fixture in our community, Alpha Soda—which was established in 1920 and is said to be the oldest standing business in its city—draws crowds. Not so last night. The normally packed parking lot was almost empty, as was the restaurant. The wait at the hostess station was a nanosecond, as was the wait for service. Why?

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Yesterday, I met a co-worker for lunch. You're thinking ho-hum, big deal. Actually it was a big deal for me, because my employer and almost all of my co-workers are located 624 miles from me. However, two of us telecommute long distances from our homes, which just happen to be in the same general geographic area.

Our lunch was postponed several times because of teleconferences with our on-site co-workers. It almost was postponed yet again because of a crisis the likes of which I personally haven't experienced since 1973. Although this crisis pales next to the financial sector's woes, it's a big issue in certain areas of the country.

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Reading news of the campaign trail last week, I recalled a park cookout I attended years ago while visiting a friend in West Lafayette, Ind. The conversations there weren’t normal, and not your typical neighborhood get-together talk. These people, including my friend, were nuclear engineering majors at Purdue University, and they were talking about the benefits of, well, their major—and France.

The conversations covered a lot of the same stuff as Sen. John McCain did on the stump last week (albeit with a bit more technical jargon). “The French are able to generate 80 percent of their electricity with nuclear power,” McCain said, providing the lead for a BusinessWeek report. “There’s no reason why America shouldn’t.”

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Last week media reported long gas station lines, with motorists grumbling over record prices. That sounded like 1970s oil-crisis America, but that’s not what reporters were writing about on Friday.

They were reporting from Beijing.

There, The Times of London gave reports of long lines outside petrol stations as Chinese motorists attempted to fill up before the government removed fuel subsidies. That action jacked up gas prices by 18 percent. This came on the heels of other Asian countries reducing their own subsidies, including India and Malaysia.

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The weather's warm, and my dormant Bermuda grass that appeared brown and dead all winter now is green and growing. Here in the Southeast, we've been mowing for weeks. We have a John Deere riding mower (for which we paid way too much) that requires annual service (which is also costly) and gas (also costly). It's too large for some narrow sections of our lawn, which means we also need a push mower.

Because we've been through three gas-powered push mowers in the last six years—all have given up the ghost—I persuaded my husband to buy a reel mower this year. It took some arm twisting, sharing some childhood memories, and the price of gas to convince him that the reel mower was worth a try.

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These days, wherever I go … whomever I talk to … the conversation usually turns to high gas prices. When I shake my head at the ever-increasing cost of produce at the market, my first thought after "Should I buy these blueberries at this price?" is “It’s those high fuel costs!”

It's not just the food we eat and the products we buy that are affected by high fuel/transportation costs. A young man near and dear to my heart had to round up his change and visit a nearby Coinstar® machine to turn change into dollars for the gas to visit his mother for a Memorial Day picnic (sans blueberries). Even then, he was watching the fuel gauge closely.

With the price of crude oil escalating and the price at the pump following suit, could there possibly be a silver lining to high energy costs? Maybe.

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Independence Day is just around the corner. Will it be more than just another day to gather with friends and relatives for a cookout? Perhaps now more than ever, with U.S. troops fighting on two fronts, Independence Day should mean more than a day off, a backyard barbecue, and some fireworks.

Reflecting on Independence Day and our efforts at ridding ourselves of English rule 231 years ago got me thinking about the other independence everyone seems to have been discussing for several years now: energy independence. Comparing the vise that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) uses to squeeze hard cash out of the industrialized world with the political tyranny of the British crown is a stretch, but the goal is the same—to free ourselves from external control.

And no wonder energy independence is in the news lately.

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