I'm beginning to get seriously annoyed about something: specifically the packing of my groceries in the supermarket.
Granted, they do it for you here, which makes a nice change from wrestling with your wallet while trying to squeeze everything in to the least number of bags possible to carry home, all the time conscious of the beady-eyed woman behind you in the queue with the mountain of family pack-sized shopping and three squealing children.
But oh, the waste. Everything is double bagged - but everything, even if it's just the lightest of items. Today I was handed a double-bagged portion of kale. That was it - two bunches of kale in two plastic shopping bags, one inside the other. Another double bag held a single frozen pizza. And so on.
It's symptomatic of the general waste to be found almost everywhere in America - the fuel-guzzling cars that do 12 miles to the gallon, the endless packaging on everything you buy, the enormous plates of food to be found in every restaurant. It is the least 'green' place I have ever lived: you can even still buy tungsten bulbs.
Admittedly the vastness of the U.S makes you feel that perhaps it doesn't matter quite so much, this squandering of natural resources. It's hard to worry about your fuel consumption when the nearest shop is a 15-minute drive away, or bother that you're not painstakingly recycling everything when your garage comes equipped with three huge wheelie bins to bung everything in.
But surely that's why America is such a culprit as a nation, when it comes to making commitments to living a little more lightly on the earth? It's very easy to forget the damage we do, when the world around you seems so vast that you are little more than an insignificant ant crawling around on its surface. I know I leave lights on with more impunity here, turn the heating up higher (it is bloody cold after all) and don't feel the least bit guilty about jumping in the car at every opportunity - there's no public transport so basically no other way of getting around, other than walking, which is impractical on such a large scale, or cycling, which again, would take an age. But I do demand fewer bags in the supermarket - that, I will take a stand on.