Spring next month!

Spring next month! I keep telling myself that because this weather is getting seriously depressing. It is still pouring and I desperately need to collect bramble and rotten leaves for the bugs. The bramble will be fine, just a bit wet but the rotten leaves and wood are so waterlogged that I can barely carry the bag back home from the woods. Everything in the bug room is doing well. It was a mistake to get so many spiderlings in one go at the recent tarantula show and I have made a note to self "don't do it again". I still have a large number in their little pots as I just don't have the space or containers to house them properly at the moment. I have had a very busy week sales wise but mostly non spider sales or sales of larger tarantulas that I already had pre-exhibition. Still as soon as one spider sells I immediately house up another.

I had a nice birthday and thank you to those of you who sent their best wishes. Monday was an awful day for a birthday as it is my busiest day of the week but family came over on Sunday which was nice and I am having a little party for my gym friends this evening (I have invited people from the old gym that closed last October and will be plying them with wine and trying to get them to join the new gym - I have leaflets). I am gym-less at the moment until the new gym opens in a couple of weeks. It is very odd as I go to the gym most days, it is my escape and relaxation and I am missing it already (my membership from the interim gym finished on my birthday). Why am telling you all this?

When I do get straight I intend to plough on with some jobs that desperately need doing. I must rewrite the home page of my website, it is so out of date now. I think I will mention my USP (unique selling point) which I have decided is 'I don't lie'. It loses me custom at times and it annoys some people when I won't commit but if I don't know something I will say, I won't make it up like so many other people clearly do. I am continually pressed on the sex of tarantulas. I don't know how to sex them and I don't want to. Of course my customers want females, we all want females. Sometimes I can have an educated guess when looking at a sub-adult individual but I can never be sure until it is fully adult. If someone asks me to guess I will give it my best shot but generally I don't have a clue. If I could sex them, what on earth would I do with all the unwanted males? When I fed my larger tarantulas this week I discovered that 3 of my Trinidad Olive spiders had moulted into mature males. I was not best pleased but there is nothing I can do about it, I already had one male and sadly no mature adult females. I hear all the time that someone has had a 'guaranteed' female tarantula moult into an adult male! Seriously it isn't easy to tell and if you push most people they will then sell you a female (with fingers crossed behind their back). I did actually buy a male Kilimanjaro Baboon at the recent exhibition as I have several adult females (pretty sure they are adult). I introduced him slowly to the first female and she promptly ate him when I wasn't looking! I'm not totally sure he was a Kilimanjaro Baboon, he was tiny but they do vary in size so who knows?

I finally have a new fly zapper for my bug room. You may recall that the previous one blew up when water dripped through the ceiling on the day of the tarantula show. My hubby ordered a new one from EBay but for some reason it didn't seem to attract the flies, they just flew around it. We have now returned that one and hubby found a shop that sells them so he went and got me one. I can now hear the familiar sound of 'pop pop' as I sit here typing and the zapper annihilates fruit flies in the room next door. There are an awful lot of fruit flies to zap, I'm hoping they will have disappeared from the house by tomorrow or everyone will have to keep their hand over their wine glass. I'm quite used to swallowing the odd fruit fly but my guests are likely to be a bit more picky.

Well better get a move on, all these spiders won't feed themselves. At least not without me opening the lids and tipping crickets in. After many years of practise I am actually quite quick but you do need the correct size crickets or the food will eat the spider. I am still running the 15% off all small tarantulas, I will probably keep it going for another week. I will have to see how the spider housing situation goes!