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Calm before the storm


Calm before the storm, nothing much to report this week on the bug front. However, I will be attending an exhibition on Sunday, so next week it will be ‘all change’. I have my shopping list and will try to stick to it as the winter is fast approaching and sales slow considerably pre-Christmas. I know people find that odd as most businesses have a huge surge of sales at that time but my surge comes in January when my customers have their Christmas money J.

I will be concentrating on captive bred animals at the bug show wherever possible and hope to buy mostly arachnids. As I said last week, spiders are selling really well and I’m trying hard to get more scorpions to attempt breeding them. I want to find the more elusive tarantulas that my customers really want, rather than buy lots of cheap ones. I think what I’m trying to say is “quality rather than quantity”.

Technology is great when it works but this week I had a couple of hundred emails from the same company over a two-hour period. I was going nuts, they were pinging in every few seconds and eventually my computer gave up and crashed! My daughter was on the phone to the company concerned but the customer care guy had no idea how to stop it. It turned out that my husband had set up an out of office notice when I went away in July and this notice was causing the fault, as emails were bouncing back and forth between the two systems. Now the big question is, have you sent an email to me recently and received an out of office reply? Nobody has mentioned anything to me but I do recall someone saying that they knew I was away, which seemed an odd thing to say as I wasn’t! I do hope my computer has not been sending out this message, sadly unless someone tells me, I won’t know about it.

It has been a very quiet week for sales, perhaps because the schools have gone back? It certainly hasn’t been quiet on a personal level with several birthdays of close family and friends J. We are having a barbecue tomorrow to celebrate the ‘birthday week’, thankfully the weather is looking good. I will be spending today cleaning and clearing up the house, garden and bug room. There will be many children coming tomorrow who want to meet Barney the Bearded Dragon.

Photo this week: I love my Flowerland garden centre. I think it is important to support our local shops if we want them to survive (so sad to hear that Debenhams is in trouble now, it is my favourite store). Flowerland is a great place to visit, they have lovely plants but also many interesting sections such as cards and gifts, stationary and crafts, pets, aquatics, cafe and of course reptiles as this is where I bought Barney. This week I noticed they have Stag beetle models, not just the impressive male but the female too, how cool is that? (might have to put them on my list to Santa)


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