Spring at last!

Spring at last! I love this time of year, the plants are growing and all the animals are having cute little babies (some more cute than others). My fish pond is full of frogspawn so I had to buy a new net to transfer some into my 'fish free' ponds at the end of the garden. I don't think the frogs are very keen on all the newts but if I leave the spawn where it is the fish will surely eat all the tadpoles. Back to the bugs, they too are reproducing, my Kilimanjaro Baboon has laid an egg sac and I will be introducing my Costa Rican Chevron tarantulas this week. I have been waiting ages for a mature male to go with my female. Some Horse-Head grasshoppers emerged a few days ago, hopefully more will hatch soon, my Cave crickets have produced young at last and everyone is offering me their new stock. The bug room is overflowing. I'm so glad we rearranged the shelving last week, it has given me so much more room to work. I bought in a large number of spiders, scorpions and beetles on Wednesday. They are not all on the site yet as they need identifying, photographing etc. It certainly is a very busy time of year, animal shows are all gearing up for Easter.

You may have noticed that I have put details of my next Open Afternoon in the pink information box. I already have one booking so do let me know if you would like to come along. It is nice to meet my customers and have a chat, mostly I only get to communicate by email.

My web guy has added a new payment option to the website. I don't understand it but hopefully some of you might! It is called Pingit and means payments can easily be made from your phone to mine (so they say). I am getting quite a number of people asking about taking orders over the phone. I am really reluctant to go back to this system. Two main reasons 1)It is costly to me 2)It takes time that I just don't have and also even if I did take payment over the phone the order would still need to be placed via my website to keep the stock list current and give me details of my customers. I don't think there is an easy way to do it. Before my online shop taking card details was often a pain as I would frequently get to the end of the process and the automated voice would simply say "payment not authorised". It didn't give any details so then I would need to go back to my customer. Anyway I will look into how easy it would be and the costs involved. Most of my orders are paid via PayPal, it would be good if more people used the direct bank transfer. PayPal is a pretty good system but don't get me started on the unscrupulous people who try to claim a chargeback. That story is certainly for another day. I have 100% success when it comes to charge backs but PayPal still make me jump through hoops to reclaim the money that was rightly mine in the first place. These people are committing fraud but it is obviously too costly for the banks to chase them and they are generally people with no money anyway.

There will be no blog next week as we (hubby and I, yes he actually has a weekend off!) will be taking a break in 'sunny Brighton', whether it is sunny or not I cannot wait for a couple of days away. I won the break in a Highland Spring competition. Number one daughter and mother in-law will be looking after all the animals but I won't be checking emails or answering calls. I probably won't be able to post orders on the following Monday (31st) as I won't be around to do the paperwork at the weekend so I will need Monday to catch up.

This weekend looks like a very wet one in our area. Hope it is better where you are!