How Not to Spend Your Sunday Afternoon

It was a beautiful, warm Sunday and the weather has finally decided to calm down here in the Phoenix area. I could have lounged under an umbrella and read a good book by the pool. I could have left the windows open and watched Football games while laying on the couch all afternoon. But sometimes work gets in the way of the best-laid plans.

My partner and I headed down to the Ultimate Woman's Expo at the Phoenix Convention Center, to find future vendors for a Wellness and Beauty Expo scheduled for this spring for a client of ours. Spending time with Rada is always fun and we accomplished exactly what we set out to do, as there were many wonderful companies at this expo. But that's not what this post is about.....

Have we stooped so low as a country that we actually choose to spend out Sunday afternoons walking around a gigantic space, with huge plastic bags to collect paper brochures, cheap giveaways and drink pee-sample cups full of some energy-producing drink? Judging by the number of people attending this expo, the answer is unequivocally, YES!

I cried for the trees cut down so that we could produce this endless waste of printed pulp. I wonder how much of it landed in trash cans for today's pick-up.

The vendors shared with us that many people weren't buying at the expo this year. Blamed it on the economy. And maybe that was true. I did see whole families trying to piece together the chocolates from one booth with the green tea samples and finishing off their meal with a cup full of popcorn. Our favorite line was for the free squirt of some kind of alcohol. Most of the women in line had strollers, by the way.

Part of the blame needs to go to the vendors themselves. It's was kind of fun to go up to a booth and start asking technical questions on exactly how their product worked. The answers were hysterical. "The light beems to the patch that allows your wrinkles to relax in about two weeks!" Maybe the product is amazing but the salesmen were uneducated and laughable at best. What I learned is to become a skeptic, that's all.

So free is good, except for the gas to get there and the $10 parking fee!

Is it just me (an empty nester), or have we as a nation stopped paying attention to the quality of our lives?