If you drive 1,000 miles per month and make 20 miles to the gallon, you will pay about $50 more per month than you did a year ago.

That's not pocket change.

We know the higher cost of energy will affect our cost to produce and deliver the Free Press to your home each week. Even before the gas spiked, we were told of an increase in postage that would be coming in 2006.

We have come up with a way to offset the increases in fuel and postage and plan to make changes in the way we deliver the paper in the near future.

We will be looking for kids and adults who want to make a little spending money each week with Free Press home delivery service. We will start in Hillsboro and then build from there. Details will be forthcoming.

The newspapers will not be thrown in the yard but delivered in plastic sacks to porches and front doors. We will continue to mail papers to the rural areas.

It will be an opportunity for kids who are otherwise too young to get a job to earn money and learn responsibility at the same time. Seniors can do some walking for health-and get paid for it.

Home newspaper delivery is nothing new. The dailies have been delivered in this way for years.

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Another reason to make this change now is to lessen the problems of being forced to work with mailing lists that are out of date already when we buy them. To qualify for saturation rates, postal regulations require that we buying lists for the walking carrier routes that are updated every three months-but are incorrect.

We want and need to be more responsive to new residents.

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I want to make it clear that we are not unhappy with the workers in our local post office who have done a great job for us and will continue to do so.

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You have probably noticed that broadsheet newspapers have become progressively narrower over the years. They have dropped from as much as 17 inches in width to the 12.5 inches many are now. This is because of the cost of newsprint and postage.

Why couldn't we do this with our highways, too? If they were narrower, they would cost less to build. Then we could make cars narrower since usually only one person is in them anyway. If we also made them longer, we'd have three seats with a two-person width.

Now you have the potential for a triple date-which would lower the cost of courtship.

When is logic not logical?