Only two weeks until my holiday!

Only two weeks until my holiday! I can't wait but it is so difficult to go away and leave everything. The holiday is only eleven nights long and yet I have been preparing and cutting down on stock for several weeks now. Everything is going according to plan and I have managed to get things to an almost manageable level. I'm still working on cutting down the Hissing cockroach over population. I have been sending out extra with every order but I cannot send too many 'free' ones because they are heavy and therefore take the postage to the next weight and cost me money!

Sadly my female Java Jumping spider died this week. It was really odd as she died in the middle of eating a fly. I thought she was just eating and then realised that she was dried up with part of a fly in her mouth. The male is still going strong and seems to have taken over the duty of sitting with the egg sac. It will probably decide to hatch while I'm away. I will set the tank up within another tank and make sure there are plenty of fruit flies. I hope this will work, it is just the sort of thing that is difficult to organise in advance.

We have had a couple of power cuts recently, luckily the one a few mornings ago didn't last too long. When we lived next to Heathrow airport we never had power cuts, I suppose it is one of the joys of living in the countryside. The trouble is that with no power I feel completely cut off and there is little I can do. All my customer records are on the computer, including contact details. If I cannot use the computer I cannot contact anyone or process orders. I can't do much in the bug house as it is too dark, I can't pack orders, it really is chaos. Even our landline telephones are powered by electricity.

I spent ages yesterday feeding the larger spiders. It is always nice to see the newly moulted ones, they look so brightly coloured and furry. I am really surprised that the Pink Toe spiders are not selling. They are looking absolutely beautiful, I have four, I think two are possibly adult females, one looks like an immature male and the fourth one I'm not sure about. I'm hoping one will moult into an adult male then I can have a go at breeding them so I'm not too bothered that I still have them, I'm just surprised. They are very pretty, docile and reasonably priced. I think people are sometimes worried about keeping arboreal spiders. They are easy, they just need a tank that is tall rather than long. I do find that Pink Toe spiderlings are difficult to keep but the larger ones are no trouble. I love Avicularia spiders but the spiderlings seem to need very clean conditions and a flow of air. I tend to keep them in small plastic jars rather than my usual plastic boxes and they do much better kept like this.

I haven't bought any new spiders in for several weeks, it is so nice that my small size spiders are not at the 'invisible dot' stage. It makes packing them up for posting so much easier. My eyes aren't what they used to be. My contact lenses are fine, I hate wearing glasses but they certainly aren't great for very close work, i.e. spiderlings the size of a grain of vermiculite! Talking of sizes, why did I buy a ton of smaller postage boxes recently ? I really should have ordered some larger ones too. I have found it difficult to locate enough larger boxes for my orders this week. I will have to visit several shops at the weekend, I must get some for Monday. I was tipping things out of boxes that I needed yesterday morning.

Lastly, I have noticed that a small number of email addresses bounce back when an order has been placed via my website and also when I have replied to an enquiry via my website. I spoke to my IT support (husband) about it and he told me that it appears to be when people have typed in their email address incorrectly. If you don't get a reply from me please don't assume that I am ignoring you. I know I'm always threatening to ignore troublesome emails but in reality I very rarely do.