A mixed sort of a week

A mixed sort of a week. I was most upset to get an email from a guy, in which he had cut and pasted the thread from a forum where people were moaning about me getting spider names wrong. That wasn't too bad but his email said I was 'getting a reputation and should be more careful'. I am careful, I try really hard but these damn spider names keep changing! Since then I have also received a very nice email pointing out a couple of name changes. This email was from a lady and very helpful indeed. I have made these changes and would just like to point out (yet again) that I really appreciate it when people take the time to point out mistakes on my website. I don't have time to go on forums and I only Google things when I know there is a problem so please help me here.

Work has been busy as ever and things are going from strength to strength with my new website. Being able to see the statistics of what I sell and to who is fascinating. It shows more and more that spiders are my main sellers and that I have a lot of repeat customers. Most of my new business comes about by word of mouth (my reputation can't be that bad). I rarely advertise these days but I do have another advert in the fabulous 'Practical Reptile Keeping' magazine. It really is a super magazine, there are lots of articles about spiders and bugs, as well as reptiles and amphibians. The photography is excellent, long may it carry on. I have been going for so many years that I have seen lots of magazines start up with enthusiasm and then just fade away but this one seems very different. I was sceptical at first but soon realised that everyone is behind it, traders want to advertise in it and main supermarkets want this magazine on their shelves.

My spider breeding is going great guns. I have several egg sacs, have mated more spiders this week and my Stout Legged Baboon spiderlings started to hatch yesterday. I haven't bred this species before so I was very pleased. Well I say bred, the female was gravid when I got her. Males are almost unheard of in captivity, I am told they don't have the 'furry' back legs and look quite different. For a baboon spider this species is very docile and tends to stay out in the open, rather than hiding away in a web.

I have, as promised, been adding more info to individual species on my site. It is going to be a very long job but I am trying to do a bit each day. I mentioned last week that I have very few wild caught spiders, even most of the adults are captive bred. I hate the idea of animals being taken from the wild, I don't import any animals but I do need to get new stock from other dealers sometimes. It is obviously preferable to breed those animals that are already in captivity.

I spent ages last weekend 'trying' to set up some bugs for a Christmas card photo. It wasn't that successful, everyone kept moving and the corn flour that I was using as snow got everywhere and covered the bugs that I was photographing. It certainly was a laugh and after all that I am determined to use the photo even if it isn't quite as I had imagined! I had to give up on my pretty Chile Beauty spider, she was so good tempered but kept walking over the top of everything that I had set up. She covered herself and everything else in flour and in the end she looked such a state that I couldn't use the photos that I took of her. The picture was supposed to look like bugs kissing under the mistletoe but the scorpion looked like it was about to eat the praying mantis, the stick insects kept grabbing at anything that moved and the Hissing cockroaches just rampaged across the lot. Hopefully I will have better luck next year, I should set it up earlier and enlist some help!