A great holiday
A great holiday but now I am back to the usual chaos! Too much to do and not enough time to do it. I am writing this blog a day early because I have so much on tomorrow, however I am also cooking tea for my nephew's girls who I have every Thursday after school. I have spent hours feeding my large spiders today and I really do have some beauties. I am finally getting a bit more into Facebook and I can see it's great potential. Whenever I manage to post a photo it always gets lots of views, comments and interest. I say 'manage' as I have had some mishaps along the way. In Cyprus last week I posted a nice photo of the Swallows in their nest on the terrace but it didn't appear, I assume I didn't save it? The Swallows were everywhere and must have eaten a ton of mosquitoes but I still came home with several bites. The hotel is very eco friendly, there were loads of great bugs around. We saw numerous praying mantis, the amazing Mole cricket invasion (that I did post on Facebook), Rhino beetles and other animals such as Tree frogs, zillions of lizards and best of all the baby chameleons that my husband spotted (again on Facebook). Don't mention snakes! We spent hours traipsing through the undergrowth and the only ones we saw were dead on the road. Most Cypriot people seem to hate snakes and think the island is infested with them. I love snakes and I do think there are plenty around but you have to be lucky to see them (or unlucky depending on your point of view). It was an amazing holiday, only six days but full of sun, sea and fun. I want to go back!
The bugs fared well in my absence and although extremely sad, I know that getting rid of my stick insects before the holiday was the right thing to do. I seriously need to get a grip on my time and stop keeping things that just don't go anywhere. Much as I love bugs, I cannot keep spending all the hours that I currently do on tending to them. Going on holiday made me realise just how frantic my life has become. I want to get away and see animals in the wild, in their natural environment, not spend every waking hour in the bug room!
My future plans are to stock only creatures that can be left for a few days without any special care. I intend to concentrate on spiders, scorpions, millipedes, cockroaches, crickets, beetles and cut right back on stick insects, Katydids, grasshoppers and basically anything that eats plants (sadly nobody seems to want them these days). When I started out (ok, a very long time ago) most schools had live animals in their biology department and even primary schools has class pets. I think all the modern day rules and regulations make it difficult to keep anything in the classroom now.
I have, as mentioned in my blog a couple of weeks ago, purchased a BT Guardian phone. I need hubby's help to set it up (hopefully at the weekend)but it looks great. The phone is supposed to filter out unwanted calls and only allow genuine people to get through to me. As I have said many times recently, my work landline seems to be taken over by sales calls. I really do think that 3/4 of the calls to my work number are basically 'rubbish', recorded messages, PPI, accident insurance companies (trying to tell me I can claim for an accident that I haven't had) and offers of buy 3 magazines for £1.00 each (but you have to set up a direct debit first). These calls seem to be constant on a Monday, which of course is my busiest day. I was considering getting rid of my landline but lots of people still don't want to call a mobile number. The new phone will ring as normal for people in my contacts list and ask new callers to identify themselves. If I accept them they will be added to my contacts list for next time. It sounds great, I will let you all know how it goes! I must say that I do seem to be getting more and more nuisance calls on my mobile too, I tend to ignore 'no number' calls and then call back if they leave a message.
Well that's it, everything else will have to wait until next week. I am at an exhibition this weekend so there will be a multitude of new animals appearing on my website from Monday onwards. I have already pre-ordered several new, exciting species of tarantulas. I just hope I can stick to my plan and not go off at a tangent, hubby will be there to keep me in check (good luck with that). Regular readers will realise that I have lots of ideas and good intentions and I'm determined at the time but ........