50th Annual "Art In Stone" Bakersfield Show, Pt. 2

To my partial surprise, my pickup was still there safely in the Motel 6 parking lot in the morning and not even up on blocks and stripped down! ;-p

We sauntered over to the Kern County Fairgrounds and got their before just about any of the other dealers and finished our set-up.
When the 50th Annual "Art in Stone" show opened it began briskly with sales occurring in the first hour and it kept going all day which was nice.
By the end of the day my show was payed for (which includes my meteoritic purchase) and I was into the black the rest of the way.

Last year's show was a shadow of its former self as the Kern County Mineral Society (KCMS) had not been spending adequate money to promote their show in recent years.
The club's leadership is disproportionately older and they tend to think like things are how they used to be and Bakersfield is still a small city and one can have a show and folks will just show up as there is nothing else going on.
In reality, there are multiple things going on EVERY weekend in Bakersfield in the here and now and they need to spend money and go out and grab folks and bring them in.
This year they did at the urging of members like dealer chair Manny Hernandez and it payed off for me at least as I saw much more sales than last year.
Unfortunately, many of the dealers they used to have don't go there anymore so this year's show saw only four returning dealers from last year's show including us.
However, with what they did this year I feel they have an opportunity to build their show back up again and I now recommend this show to other dealers out there IF KCMS spends the dough for promotion again next year.

It was nice to see so many repeat customers from this show last year and from the previous weekend's show in Lancaster and even from the previous Bakersfield show the month before. We even had a guy visit us who we first met at last year's Big Sur Jade Festival who lives in Wasco.

There was no theft the first day in contrast to the year before which was nice.

At the end of the day we headed over to our room at Motel 6 and while checking in a young white gal ("white trash" all the way) with "meth mouth" (few teeth left and what few remained were discolored and rotten) and maybe even oral herpes as her lips were all swollen with boils (or maybe that's an element of "meth mouth") ambled in with three children in tow.
She told the clerk that her two-month old was locked in her room as she had left the two-year old to watch it while she got ice and it had left the room to join her closing the door behind it and now she couldn't get in.
When the clerk checked the paperwork for that room there was only one person, a man, registered there, but this gal said she was staying with her boyfriend.
A member of the housekeeping staff was then asked about it and they said this gal had been there for a couple of days at least.
The manager was then summoned and they were about to rescue the young'un but boot out the family for fraudulently paying for just one person but having six people staying in the room.

Situations like this further reenforce in my mind my view that the laws should be changed for the allowance of forced spaying and neutering of citizens like this man and woman who now have four children who will undoubtedly grow up to be like them and be a drain on the public treasury through the legal, welfare, and health care systems.
I must be a terrible person for feeling that way.

Anywho, after getting nested into our room we then went next door to Denny's for a nice, but inexpensive dinner and then settled in for the night.

I did take Tequila, my little Chihuahua/Jack Russell "Terror" for a walk in the "hood".
Up the short side street our Motel 6 is at the end of is a dirt area too small to build on trapped between the street and a fenced irrigation canal and located behind a gas station that is at the corner of White Lane and the aforementioned side street.
A large tree grows unchallenged in the middle of this small dirt area.
The dirt all around is pitted with mounds of dirt adjacent to large, dark holes with all other vegetation stripped from the area, not even a weed grows there. The texture and color and overall appearance of this scene struck me as ominous and reminiscent of Pitch Black and The Bone Snatcher as if some monstrous creatures lived deep down in those holes which led down to subterranean caverns where surface-dwelling victims are dragged down into to be bloodily devoured and use the confusion and anonymity of the urban jungle to remain undetected.
It would be kinda cool if this were true in a grim sort of way but alas, no dice, as I spotted ground squirrels on those mounds the next morning as I left.