Jacket for Two, Please

It's been a slightly stressful and very busy week, and with no time for blogging there's a lot I need to catch up on! First, I have to share a little about last night's activities, which involved driving to Overland Park to the Johnson County Home & Garden Show. I'm not much into home and garden shows in general, and especially not home and garden shows on Saturday nights, but I volunteered to man the booth for No More Homeless Pets KC at this event and got assigned to the 5:30-9:00 shift. I'd been wanting to volunteer with NMHPKC for many months now, and this was one of the first weekend opportunities available, so I took it despite the less than perfect hours.

Overall, my first NMHPKC event was rather uneventful, as the home show attendance really started to slow down in the evening, and the booth was manned with at least twice as many volunteers as it really needed. There wasn't really much for us to do, unfortunately. In my 3 1/2 hour shift, I talked to two interested people about the organization's low cost spay/neuter services, handed out a couple of brochures, talked to one guy about Petfinder, and received one donation of a few dollars. I guess maybe if two more unaltered animals get spayed or neutered or one gets adopted because of the education I provided, then my trip was worth it. Overall though, the experience wasn't quite as fulfilling as I had hoped.

Since there were so many volunteers and so little to do, we took turns walking around the booths at the show, checking out all that was available. At first I was a little less than impressed, as the first floor of the Overland Park Convention Center was filled with quite a few ultra random displays, some of which didn't really have much to do with homes or gardens (like the nail stamping lady that was across the way from us). When I went to the upstairs level, however, I was amazed at the crazy huge demonstrations! There were hundreds of vendors of every type--it would have taken hours to view everything. There were entire outdoor entertaining areas complete with fireplaces, huge gardens and landscaped areas, and entire kitchens, to name just a few. I quickly realized that the small room downstairs that we were in was clearly filled with the oddball products and non-profits that didn't really fit in with everyone else at the show! About the only interesting thing in our area was the booth of beautiful rescued, rehabbed birds from Operation Wildlife.

While the weirdness in our area didn't offer much in the way of useful education about your home or garden, it did offer a little in the way of entertainment. In one of my first tours around the area I saw this.

I really thought this was a joke at first, but then I realized that the "display" was sandwiched in between two serious vendors and was apparently completely real. There was no one manning the booth at all, which was nice for me because that made it easier to take a couple of pictures. Just as I was scratching my head and wondering about where in the world you and your loved one would wear such a garment, I realized that their info banner had answered all of my questions.


Wow. Just wow. As much as I love my husband, I cannot imagine any circumstance in which I would want to wear this monstrosity with him. Ever. Even if it wasn't completely ridiculous looking, it's the most impractical article of clothing I've ever seen. Plus, I just checked out the website, and it actually costs $140. Seriously.

So the evening may have been a bit of a bust with regard to my volunteer gig, but I think it was worth the trip just to have witnessed the Jacket for Two!