The bug show was great at Kempton Park

The bug show was great at Kempton Park last Saturday. I was trying to work out how many years I have been attending the AES show and it is an awful lot! It is always nice to catch up with people year after year and also meet customers that I have only spoken to on the phone or communicated with by email. I took an extensive shopping list with me and purchased a huge amount of new stock. I tried to stick to mostly arachnids because that is undoubtedly what I sell primarily these days. I did get a few new stick insects and even some praying mantids. I know I said I was giving them up but I haven't seen any Cryptic mantids for ages and I am especially fond of them. I remember first seeing them at London Zoo and I thought they were beautiful. They seem to be fine kept as a colony which is most unusual for mantids. I checked on them yesterday and they looked very happy and healthy. Obviously my week has been taken up with housing, feeding, labelling and the incredibly time consuming job of entering all the new animals on the website and stock lists. I am still working on it, everything has been fed but I need to find room for some of the larger spiders. What I really need is to sell some! But I am not complaining as it has also been a very good week for sales. I just need another 'me' to help with the workload and things will be fine (failing that a win on the lottery this weekend would good).

I was pleased to purchase quite a number of adult and sub-adult tarantulas. Some were a bit more expensive than I would have liked but over the last few months people have been asking for larger spiders. I am loath to buy large spiders without seeing them as I have had some ropey looking spiders arrive in the post. I have received spiders with a leg missing or shrunken abdomens, they are generally ok in the end but it means a lot of TLC from me over often several months to a year. It is so much better to visit a supplier or exhibition to actually pick out the best specimens and I am very picky! I was especially pleased with the Salmon Pink spiders, they are stunning specimens and obviously captive bred and lovingly cared for.

I finally found out the name of the mantids that we came across on our Rhodes holiday in August. I didn't think they were the usual European mantis (Mantis religiosa). My friends Graham and Janice Smith were at the show and instantly knew that they were Iris Oratoria.

On the technology front I have again taken a scary leap this week, well two scary leaps. Firstly I have a new mobile phone, I am getting on ok at the moment. It is quite similar to my old one, hopefully I won't have the old problem of not receiving all my voice mail messages and then receiving a whole batch a week or two late. I was sent a new sim card some weeks ago and told that it would solve the problem but only last week it happened again. This is very annoying as people obviously think that I am ignoring them and I would guess that some messages have not been reaching my phone at all? I didn't like the fact that my old mobile didn't have an engaged signal, when I was talking on the phone it would simply go to voice mail. I thought I could solve that problem with a new phone but unfortunately I now know that it is a feature of Vodafone so there is nothing I can do about it. I wanted to stick with Vodafone because it certainly has the best coverage in our area. I liked being on the Orange network (it was cheaper) but the coverage was awful and I didn't like standing in the garden to make or accept a call! The second technological breakthrough was all down to my husband. He has been nagging at me for ages to allowing him to link up two monitors to my computer. I thought this was a mad idea and my poor brain wouldn't be able to cope. However after I got him to shred a huge pile of old order forms last week and it took him hours, he decided to go ahead and set them up. He asked me why I printed out every order and I said it was because I need to see the order and the customer details at the same time. As usual he was right, the two screens are perfect. I no longer need to print out orders because the information is stored on my website and it is a more green option and cheaper as printer cartridges are expensive. I haven't had any problems with the screens and I am finding the system more and more helpful as I get used to it. It is also very handy when entering online competitions as I can have the entry page on one screen and search for information on the other.

I seem to have so much to say this week but I think I had better save it until next week as the emails are piling up on my other screen! I was very busy in the bug house yesterday and it was a family birthday so I had little time to answer emails. I will make a cup of tea and get started on them now.