So, today was the first day of the fall season of expos, which means....Darien! Drive over to the expo hall Friday, Meredith was going to meet me at the hotel later, and set up. Ran into Laura, the person who did Taffy's puppy photos, she has a booth at the expo. Dropped off the donation basket which I almost forgot (but threw together ultra last minute on my way out of town) and set up the booth. Made it back to the hotel and had time to unpack and chill and then Meredith showed up. In continuation with my everything-going-wrong theme, as of late, one of my folding table separated from it's frame. Wonderful. And then we went to a gas station and the pump I pulled up to didn't work. That all caused a need for happy comfort food to end the day positively, so we headed to Montecasino Cafe Grill.
I'm not usually the type to sit here and rave about any product or place, but if you haven't been to Montecasino (which, unless you live across the street, you probably don't know it even exists), you need to go. It's this little hole-in-the-wall Mexican place on N. Ardmore in Villa Park. I admit, not the best part of Villa Park, and it's in a strip mall, and you will blow by it if you are not careful. But they have the BEST food. Great prices. It's byob, there's a liquor store next door to help with that. It is awesome and the food was awesome as always. Great big portions. We always say we're gonna have dessert and barely even have room to finish the entree. Love love LOVE the place.
Anyway, so that was Friday. Back to the hotel and today started the expo. It was a super slow day for Darien, which is usually one of the more hopping expos. Presented with my new presentation on chinchillas, which went over way better (no glazed over faces this time) than my old speech. Tom from West Burb Weiners held Julie, the chin that came to the expo, while I presented. It went well. He asked if he could say something, and he must have remembered last time, because he assured me that he would not talk about housing. For those that weren't around then, at one of the expos last year, I handed him the microphone and he proceeded to talk about keeping chins in aquariums and giving them pvc pipe to chew on and all sorts of unsafe things.... Which I then had to explain why everything he said was bad advice. But this time, true to his word, he just talked a bit about how he and his wife had chinchillas for years and loved them. So that went well.
Slow day expo wise, not many sales. $5 in donations, and we only got that because, towards the end, a kid came into the booth, asked what our donation box was for. Meredith told him it was for people to donate money. He asked his parents if they had $1, and they asked what for. "They have no money ." So true. So they donated $5, which was awesome. Every little bit helps. Though it is disheartening, still, to see the dog rescues that get $20s donated, multiple, and we get $5 all day. People think it's cheap running a small animal rescue. It's not. I meant to mention this in the presentation but forgot -- it cost over $25,000 to run the rescue last year. You know what we made in donations over the last year? Just over $1000, and $500 of that was from one couple. Without them, most years it's not even usually $500 per year. Don't get me wrong I'm sure dog rescues are expensive as well. But just because these guys are small animals doesn't mean they're cheap to care for. But unfortunately that seems to be the perception.
Anyway, that was it for the day, going to go to bed in a few and hope tomorrow's a busier day for us.
I apologize for any typos, this was typed out on my iPhone.
Goodnight.
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