1) The squeaking steering boot: something in the steering mechanism needs grease. My indy tech did this in a few seconds for me last year. I didn't even get out of the car and he didn't charge me.

2) Fuel economy: if you live in a cold weather area, your fuel is reformulated for winter, which results in lower mileage. If it's particularly cold, your mileage will go down still further. Moreover, if you idle the car to warm it up, those minutes are being calculated by the computer as 0mpg for x minutes. That really skews the average! You can watch this number go down while you're idling. Have you tried resetting the mpg computer to zero when you start out driving, to give it a clean slate?