A lovely sunny week, England got through to the next round and I'm off for a spa day today (my nephew's fiancee's hen day), so all is well in my world. The bugs are happy too, everything seems to be growing and reproducing. I am being very strict with myself and haven't bought in any new stock this week. I really need to concentrate on looking after the enormous amount of animals that I seem to have accumulated recently. It is so nice to have successfully cut down my stick insect collection to a more manageable level. I have enough bramble growing in my garden to feed those that I have now, no more looking suspicious cutting down greenery in the woods! I have managed to shift the surplus of Barking Birdeater spiders that I had (ordered 20 but ended up with 34) and my first one has laid an egg sac this week. I think most of the spiders are adult females and hopefully many will be gravid.
A strange thing happened with my mobile phone this week. I was in the gym when it suddenly started beeping and a multitude of voice mail notifications appeared. I stood and listened to them all and they went back to May. When I got home I rang Vodafone who told me that I needed a new sim card. I now have a new card and I'm sorry if you were one of those people who thought that I had been ignoring you. Talking of phones I'm pleased to say that several people have telephoned me with their enquiries this week. It really is so much easier to deal with complicated or multiple questions on the phone, rather than by email. I am now using my 'delete' button much more but I always feel guilty. I sometimes get so many emails that I just cannot answer them all, I get to the end and they start popping up again. I must say that texts are even worse, I don't get that many texts from people but when I do you will often get a yes or no answer in reply because I am just too slow at texting. I find talking to someone much easier but I think that a lot of people don't like talking on the phone, I often ask people to call me when they have sent a complicated email (that I am quite happy to help with) but they generally never call. I don't bite - honest. Sometimes it is difficult to talk, like the other day in Tesco. I was standing at the checkout and really couldn't discuss blue bottle flies and the benefits of feeding them to arboreal tarantulas.
This week I introduced a minimum order on my website. It is something that I have been thinking about for a while but it became necessary because of the amount of small orders that I receive and the fact that they take the same amount of time to process as a larger order. I have recently had a couple of people buying a £1.00 book and one guy bought a single plastic pot valued at 25p.
Last but not least, people often ask which is my favourite bug and I have several, but I thought I would just mention my least favourite bug. There is an outright winner for this title, the Surinam cockroach! I would be happy to never see one again. It has nothing to do with them being a cockroach, I love Hissing cockroaches, they are in my top three bugs, it is the fact that I just cannot eradicate them. I have been trying to clear my bug house of them for several years and they just keep turning up, big fat healthy females, producing loads of babies. I started cleaning my Ethiopian cricket tank yesterday morning because there didn't seem to be many babies in there. I soon discovered why, buried in the peat substrate were loads of Surinam cockroaches. I ended up having to empty the entire tank and it certainly wasn't an easy job with crickets leaping everywhere and running up my arms. I had to pick out each and every individual cricket just to make sure that I didn't reintroduce a single cockroach. I'm sure you can imagine how long it took. I have taken the Ethiopian crickets off my site until they start breeding again but I don't think it will be long as the females started dipping their ovipositors into the fresh peat as soon as I put them back in the tank.
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