I’m miffed and I’m late for work. He always leaves the tank empty in this thing. Every single time.

It wasn’t that bad before the price of gas doubled. I knew I could throw scrape up the change from the console and get enough in the tank to get to work.

But not now.

Now I have to walk. Back to the gas station that I passed, with the hope of making to the next one. You know, the one that’s usually five cents cheaper. Do I walk three miles up the road or two miles back? In these heels, no less.

I should have stopped.

I should have worn sneakers.

I should have ridden my bike.

I shouldn’t have married that idiot …

As unwanted jumbo SUVs and trucks come off lease, they’re clogging American auto auction and dealer lots. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Oversize vehicles make perfect sense where gas is cheap and you have lots of people to move about. They make even more sense when you can buy them with cheap US dollars.

According to the Jacksonville Business Journal, Jacksonville’s port is booming with auto exports. “The number of autos exported from the port authority’s terminals in the eight months to May 31, 2008, has increased by about 58 percent from the same period to May 31, 2006.”

So where do we send our unwanted American iron?

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It was a summer night, just like this. We had a bar-b-que. All the neighborhood was there. It just felt like the right thing to do, I guess.

Everyone was doing it. So we went along for the ride.

Not long after that night, I noticed I was getting strange looks at traffic lights. Like I was doing something wrong. Mostly it was strange people in little foreign cars and those funny looking hybrids with lots of bumper stickers.

It didn’t hit home at first, but after a while I began to understand. And I began to dread climbing into the truck to pick up the kids from school to shuttle them to soccer practice.

Then the price of gas went crazy. That really messed things up.

Between the cost to fill the tank and the angry looks, I don’t know if I can take it. We want to trade the Hummer in on something that’s better on gas, but none of the dealers want to give us anything for a trade-in.

Last Saturday, after we drove a hybrid, the salesman asked us if we were thinking about trading a car in - he didn’t see that we had driven up in the H2 - and he spit his coffee out (on the kids!) when we told him.

It was quite an uncomfortable scene.