Yesterday, when I could have been spending my day as I usually do, sorting through hundreds of model contest entry photos, I was up at BP headquarters in Chicago, listening to a lecture on fuels. Yeah. Fuels.

I, along with four other bloggers (Dumb Little Man, Busy Mom, Wisconsin Mommy and Phil Slice), were handpicked by BP to be their Invigorate Insiders, test their new blend of Invigorate gasoline for a couple of months, and then write about it on their site. In return, they're paying for my gas for the next 10 weeks. (Now you know why I skipped model photo sorting to sit in a conference room and watch a Power Point presentation on gas.)

What's the big deal about Invigorate? Without getting all scientific on you, it's got proprietary detergents added in to clean the built-up crap off your valves and prevent engine sludge, letting your car run better and more efficiently, longer.

They showed us the test results of using regular gas without detergents vs. using theirs with, on a V6 engine rigged up to run three cylinders on competing gas and three on Invigorate (which was an impressive engineering feat on its own), and even hung-over and jet-lagged I could see a big difference. It also made me realize what I'm doing to my car, now that my almost-$5-a-gallon gas buying habit consists of pumping in the cheapest mid-grade I can find. (Yeah, it specifically says to use Premium, but I'm The Bachelor Guy, not The Donald.)

Will Invigorate do the same to my ride over the next couple of months? No idea. But if you're interested you can read what we all have to say, good and bad, on BPInvigorate.com starting in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I'm heading out to fill up. With Premium.