Virginia Cheeseman Blog

Quick catch up, sorry I didn't get a chance to write my blog as usual yesterday morning. This wasn't due to the Royal Wedding but due to my husband getting knocked off his motorbike on his way home from work, on Thursday evening. Thankfully he will be fine, just a bit sore and bruised but it certainly wasn't nice to get a call from the hospital. Unfortunately the ambulance took him to Watford hospital, which is miles away but my lovely nephew and super sat nav got me there! All the bugs are fine, lots of new stock arrived in the week. Hopefully once the bank holidays are over, the orders will start rolling in again! Hope you all enjoyed the royal wedding, I'm busy preparing for our street party tomorrow. Barring accidents I will write a full blog next Friday.

Where are all my customers? What a strange week, I have received a fraction of the orders that I generally receive at this time of the year. I know there are a multitude of bank holidays which are messing up the postal system and people are away at Easter but honestly it has been pretty dire this week. I certainly hope business improves soon! Especially as I have new stock coming in on an almost daily basis. I have got some lovely new stick insects this week and a large number of spiders, about a dozen new tarantula species and a couple of true spiders. I haven't had time to enter them all onto the website yet but I will be doing it later today. Next week I have a lot more tarantulas arriving so I really, really need to sell some to make room! Not to mention money, there is far more going out than coming in at the moment. I'm not very good at maths but it's blatantly obvious that the situation is a worrying one. Of course I could panic for England and I may well be rushed o...

We had a lovely few days away in the beautiful Oxfordshire countryside. The weather could not have been better, the sun shone every day. We went on a Hawk Walk (www.hawkwalk.org), where we learnt about various birds of prey and got to fly both hawks and owls. It was truly amazing, a fantastic experience that I would recommend to anyone, there were only four people in our group. In fact it got me thinking that I should set up a page of links to other websites. I would be happy to publicise small businesses and societies that I approve of and enjoy. I am a member of many animal charities and my website gets a huge number of hits per month (it's a shame all those people don't actually place an order!). We went to several nature reserves on our travels and saw lots of Slow worms and even a Grass snake, I was ecstatic, I'm sure you all know by now how much I love snakes and to see one in the wild is wonderful. I just need to see an Adder next but I understand that they are very...

April Fool's Day but this kitchen is no joke. The kitchen fitter will be finished today but there is so much more to do, decorating, tiling, skirting boards, doors, the list goes on. Working with all this around me and a puppy in tow has been unbelievably stressful. No more major building work for me, anything else that needs doing on this house will either be done by my hubby or not done at all! It's been a busy week all round. I have bought in several new spiders, some a good size and some ridiculously small dots. I must start asking people for body length when I am getting in new spiders. Leg length generally means nothing at all, I call it 'the squashed with a hammer measurement' as I'm sure that's the only way the spider would ever attain that leg span. I was reading on Google only yesterday about the Barking Birdeater spiders, their leg span is stated to be up to 20cm but the body length is approximately 6cm. How on earth could a spider with a 6cm body len...