Virginia Cheeseman Blog

This year is disappearing fast, I’m sure the years are speeding up as I get older. Perhaps it is just that we don’t seem to have had hardly any sunny days this year. The storms all week have been amazing. The huge claps of thunder and the blue flashes of zig zagging lightening have been more like tropical storms than the weather we generally have in England. The garden is looking good, it does resemble a jungle but I like it that way and so does the wildlife. I am just so grateful to our roofing guy who came to repoint our roof recently and ended up, dare I say it “fixing” my office/bug room roof. It is 15 years this month since we moved to this house, 15 years of flooding in my bug room. Can it really be properly fixed this time? Many people have tried and failed (the roof design is awful). I am so confident that I have dared to stock the shelves with my precious bugs on that side of the room for the first time ever! Everything is looking good in the bug room. It’s been a busy half te...

Bugs, bugs everywhere! The BTS (British Tarantula Society) annual exhibition last weekend was great fun, lots to see, lots to buy and lots of people to meet. I went bonkers again and bought a huge number of spiders, scorpions, millipedes, beetles, assassin bugs, caterpillars – yes way too much of everything. All I need to do now is sell some animals to make some room, I have really focussed on getting the new stock housed, fed, labelled, entered onto my stock lists and last but not least the website. If it’s not on the website, it won’t be going anywhere. I found this out the week before last. I was wondering why my beautiful Giant Lime Green stick insects (Diapherodes gigantica ) weren’t selling and then found to my annoyance that I had never uploaded them to the site! I ‘may’ have made a mistake with the beautiful rainbow coloured, Giant Pill millipedes. My hubby said I was like a kid in a toy shop, I certainly was blown away by their beauty, excitement took over and I purchased ten....

A much better week! The sun is shining, the wi-fi is working and all is well with the world (I’m sure I could think of something to moan about if I tried!). I have been concentrating on getting the bug room clean and cleared this week as I know that next week will be manic. I will be buying in a great deal of new stock this weekend and will therefore have little time for my usual weekly tasks. Yesterday and today are designated “paperwork days”. I need to get the paperwork on my desk in some sort of order. I actually bought a set of clear plastic draws a few weeks ago and had every intention of putting each day’s post and paperwork into the top draw and then sorting everything out by urgency, I put labels on the draws ‘today’s work’, ‘must do draw’, ‘not so urgent’ and ‘look at later’ but somehow, I have a huge pile on my desk again, each of the draws is full and even the ‘must do draw’ has only received an occasional glance. It certainly is spring now and I love it, I’m totally obsess...

Unbelievable week, to quote from that excellent show ‘The Good Place’, what the fork! I took no orders at all over the bank holiday weekend. I know people were out in the sunshine but after such an amazing April, to have no orders come in was truly weird and proves my point that I could never employ anyone to help me because at times there is plenty of work looking after the animals and money going out but zero money coming in. On Tuesday (first work day after the bank holiday) we had a power cut that lasted ten hours! I have said it so many times before that I have never lived anywhere with so many power cuts, it is crazy and never, ever happened when we lived next to Heathrow airport! Unfortunately, my back went on Monday when I picked up a box of soil so I can honestly say I felt crippled on Tuesday in every way. I pottered around but without power there was no computer, no phone, no lights, no hot water and really very little I could do. I couldn’t even sit and watch the telly! Unb...