Yesterday, during the final day of the Home and Garden Show at Meadow Event Park, I slipped outside to Big Red to catch a cigarette. I sat on my trusty bar stool that has been in Red for at least two years and I've sat on it about 76,000 times.  This time, the stool objected, collapsed and my fat butt hit the floor with a resounding thud.

I'm not sure what was worse. the bruise to my backside or the bruise to my ego. I am, however, awfully sore this morning. I wonder why?

The show this weekend was not as successful for us as I would have liked. It was a first year show and had pretty good traffic. Unfortunately, the crowd just wasn't a very hungry crowd. I didn't have the best location and was kind of hidden behind two of those big storage containers (8x16x8) that were on display. Also, since it was my first show at Meadow Event Park, people and even the vendors don't know us and that is part of the building process that takes a couple of events to take off.

I'd like to do this show again next time and see if that building doesn't improve my sales.

 The seminars were a huge success led by Andre Viette. He's a big draw among gardening folks in Virginia and the seminar area was packed at every session. He got a chuckle out of my story about planting 31 zucchini plants one year out of sheer stupidity.

I was very impressed with Anthony and Joe of Savor, the food and beverage division of SMG, the concessions folks for MEP. They were fabulous to work for and I'm only sorry my 

commissions to them weren't much larger.

It was great to find some old friends there like Lemonade John, his wife and daughter, and Steve Randall and Scott of TJ's Catering (Helmut's Strudel). And we saw some customers from Richmond shows and even some from back in my old days at the Fredericksburg Auto Auction.

Unfortunately, I found out Friday that I was getting bumped out of my planned appearance next weekend at the Richmond Fishing Expo at MEP.  The promoter just didn't have any space for me

 even though we'd done his show the past four years at Richmond Raceway.  Too bad. That was a really good show for us.

And, to clear up some old business, ie my last post ranting at Dell and Verizon.  The printer finally arrived on Friday, exactly one week from the promise of their sales folks. And, the Verizon technician came Thursday afternoon, after their promised visits of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning, corrected the problem with the incoming phone line and all seems well with our wireless system.  That leaves me to believe I didn't need a new computer, a new printer, or a new modem. It would have been nice to know that on

the first technical support call and would have saved me a lot of money. So, I'm still not happy with either company.

We've got a couple of basketball games this week as the kids are coming back. So after a good cleaning, Big Red will go back over to Liberty. And I get back to scrambling for bookings.